The toll that heavily-laden ore trucks are taking in damaging a main road in Timmins has city politicians considering applying one.
Timmins councillors aren’t enamoured with the mining industry treating the city’s main drag like a conveyor belt and they say it’s high time that industry shared in the costs to repair Algonquin Avenue.
Noella Rinaldo was one of two councillors who opined in February that the city should apply a toll or levy to the mining companies for using the city’s main east-west artery as a truck corridor.
Rinaldo said it’s evident that the street has become a haul road to transport ore from mines outside the city to processing mills in town.
Potholes on Algonquin have been a chronic problem that has been made worse over the last two years with the increased volume of ore trucks and logging trucks carrying timber to Quebec, Rinaldo observed.
“I can honestly tell you, you would have a hard time idling at a light on Algonquin without having a truck beside you, behind you or in front of you.”
Heavy trucks are being blamed for a spate of water main breaks, especially in South Porcupine, that’s closed down stretches of the road and rerouted traffic onto side streets. There are also concerns about pedestrian safety and damage the road is causing to private vehicles.
“These aren’t normal potholes,” said Rinaldo, who blames trucks for creating an egg carton-like effect at intersections.
During her door-to-door campaigning in the last municipal election, Rinaldo said the road’s sorry state became a frequent beef of residents. Now it’s a priority issue for her as council enters spring budget deliberations. The idea of a toll road was part of her re-election campaign.
“This is just too much for us to handle.”
Rinaldo believes a toll is a temporary patch; a perimeter road around the city may be a better, long-term fix that would require provincial support.
“This is a problem that’s not going to go away.”
Joe Torlone, the city’s chief administrative officer, discovered municipalities can legally impose a toll with approval of the provincial transportation minister, but it would be “an administrative nightmare to manage.”
What’s unique about Algonquin Avenue is that it also serves as provincial Highway 101.
Some of the costs for maintenance and pairs were offset by the provincial Connecting Link program, which was killed off in 2013, thus leaving the city paying the full freight for the road.
However, only a paltry $16 million was annually set aside in the fund for the entire province. The cheque to Timmins averaged between $60,000 to $100,000, hardly enough to keep pace with repairs.
Rinaldo said the province takes money for industry permits and licences that doesn’t filter back to the city. Hopefully the companies can add their voice too, she said.
“We need to start the conversation. It’s been discussed and discussed but nobody’s had the fortitude to go the companies and say, we need your help here.”
There was talk of a perimeter road a decade ago when the former Montcalm Mine operators were hauling ore through the city.
But a 2008 destination study jointly conducted by the province and the city revealed a majority of the transport trucks coursing through the downtown core were mostly service trucks, not enough to warrant a bypass around the city.
Torlone said local processing mills like Northern Sun receives 22 ore trucks a day from a mining client in Sudbury. And there is concern that with Goldcorp’s recent purchase of Probe Mines, near Chapleau, more trucks could be headed their way in the future.
The site of a toll booth on Algonquin may never come to pass, but the talk at council caught the attention of the mining companies.
In a meeting in early March with Goldcorp, Lake Shore Gold, Gowest Gold and Northern Sun, there was disappointment expressed by the companies that the idea of a toll road was not discussed in their presence. Even some of the area’s forestry players want in on the conversation, said Timmins Mayor Steve Black.
“It’s a delicate situation,” said Black, who worked as a Glencore superintendent before being elected mayor last fall. “We’re a mining and forestry (town). We’ve always had trucks in the community, but at the same time we have a lot of infrastructure challenges ahead.”
As a community reliant on 3,000 direct jobs in mining and many more on the supply side, Black said the city wants to be business-friendly, but needs to work with industry on a solution.
For future discussions, Black said the companies agreed to look at what options are available to find alternative routes to divert trucks off Algonquin. At the same time, the city needs to get a handle on how many supply trucks are using the road to service local retailers.
“There are a lot of trucks on the highway that aren’t related to the mines and we just want to quantify how much traffic we would be diverting if we created a mining-specific alternate route,” he said.
“It was a really good first discussion. It may not have been the answers that everyone was hoping to hear, but to get the industry players to the table was a good first step.”
Timmins’ situation was brought up with provincial cabinet ministers at the Good Roads Association annual conference in February where, Black said, Premier Kathleen Wynne admitted to delegates that a mistake was made in removing the Connecting Link funding.
Black is hopeful the province has seen the light, that southern Ontario funding formulas don’t necessarily work in Northern resource-based towns.
“We have a lower population density, heavy industrial traffic and we don’t have 401-style highways running through our communities.”
In the meantime, the city is facing a potential $30-million surface and underground repair job for a two-kilometre stretch of Algonquin. It makes Black wonder if that would be money better spent on a secondary truck corridor.
“We have to decide do we want the mining companies to help us out with that or keep pursuing these alternatives road options to take a few trucks off the main link.”
Black said local industry has always been supportive of having a bigger chunk of the provincial mining and forestry tax, and resource royalties, spent in the places where they operate.
Sault Ste. Marie opened a dedicated truck corridor in 2006 to handle traffic between the International Bridge and the Trans-Canada Highway. Sudbury is lobbying for money to extend Maley Drive in the city’s north end to steer truck traffic away from a main arterial road.
