Project Engineering Manager Denise Marshall described road work county residents can expect to be done in 2021 at the April meeting of Northumberland County council's Public Works Standing Committee – and part of the good news is that it will be done within budget.
About 13 km. of roadway will be repaved, Marshall said, listing where this will occur – on parts of County Road 8 in Trent Hills, County Road 30 in Brighton, County Road 74 in Port Hope and Elgin Street in Cobourg.
The good news is that this work will come in under the budgeted amount of $5,905,000, thanks to the $5,139,680 bid from CoCo Paving Inc. (the lower of two bids received)
The motion accepting the bid called for the difference in the two amounts to remain in the 2021 transportation capital budget except for $136,000 – which will be transferred to the 2021 micro-surfacing budget due to unexpected price rises in that kind of work.
That amount will help in the over-budget bid price Miller Paving Ltd. presented for 16 km. of work throughout the county. Also the lower of two bids received, the Miller bid was $919,390 – with $800,000 budgeted.
Marshall explained that they track the costs of this work, along with trends and averages, in preparing their budgets. Even so, the significant increases for 2021 were surprising.
“We anticipate most of the reason is COVID in one way or another – whether projects last year didn't get completed or started until later, so companies are now catching up on last year's work and trying to take on this year's work, so high demand drives up the cost,” she posited.
And if there were COVID cases among the workers, she added, that would have slowed things down as well.
Marshall later explained the process that goes into both kinds of work.
Paving is an asphalt-replacing-asphalt process, where the old layer is at least partially removed. Two to four inches of new asphalt replaces a like amount of old asphalt.
Microsurfacing is a preservation technique used to extend the life of the asphalt with a 10-mm-thick coating of an asphalt-cement emulsion laid on top of the asphalt to seal it off to water and other elements. It is spread across the entire road and may sometimes look like rubber, and the surface has a slight bit of friction to increase road safety.