Winter Road Maintenance On Central Frontenac Agenda

Public Works Manager Steve Gould presented the normal breakdown of departmental activities in his monthly report to Council. His report this month also included information about how the township exceeds the minimum road standards that are set out in the Municipal Act, and about what happens when the township declares a “Significant Weather Event”.

“Normal maintenance timelines are temporarily suspended to allow crews to prioritise critical routes and operate safely. The declaration also serves as a public safety notice, advising residents to exercise extreme caution or avoid travel when possible. Standard maintenance operations resume once the event has concluded,” says the report.

In response to the report, Councillor Nicki Gowdy made a comment, which she said was “directed at Council”.

She said that she appreciates that the township exceeds minimum road standards and works to maintain roads to the expectation of local residents.

“When these maintenance standards fall short of these expectations it becomes a significant concern for residents and Council. This is where my question comes in. Are we, as a township, content to do the minimum, or are we of the opinion that we should exceed those standards. Of course, that all comes with money, and taxpayer dollars … this winter has been a hard winter for all of us, it started early … We as a council need to look at where we are and what we see as a future, going forward with the roads.

“It all comes down to service level, I guess, and what Council wants to deliver to the residents,” said Steve Gould.

Councillor Duncan McGregor said the township has been inconsistent in the way it has engaged the public, and asked if Staff could come up with some kind of way to get “quantitative information” about what the public is willing to spend in order to improve road conditions, in order to inform the newly elected council in 2027, if a tax increase devoted to road condition improvements, is what residents really want.

Mayor Frances Smith, participating at the meeting through Zoom (Deputy Mayor Cindy Kelsey chaired the meeting) said that people who live on the side roads in Central Frontenac, need to understand “One, the hard tops get done first, 509, 38. Two, we don’t send the plows out when it is still snowing. I know we have a different schedule when there is a storm, and we work as we can through that, and the crews get their 8 hours. We can do lots more, but that would cost more and mean more taxes, and they do not want that, and we know that. And if you wrote down the number of people who complain to you, out of the population we have, I don’t think it’s that high.”

Chief Administrator Cathy MacMunn, said, “people don’t understand what the road crews are doing … that they are out at 3am.”

Winter Road Maintenance Protocol in Central Frontenac

In response to an exchange at Central Frontenac Council last week, wherein council members and Staff said that local residents are not aware of the protocols that road crews in the township follow for winter road maintenance, the Frontenac News reached out to th

e township.

We heard back from Amanda Fellows, Public Works technical assistant with Central Frontenac

She pointed out, as we reported on page 1, that in line with what all of the townships in our region do, Central Frontenac far exceeds the minimum road standards, for winter maintenance, that are set out in the Ontario Municipal Act.

The minimum road standards are indeed a minimum, and in a municipality like Central Frontenac, where a significant percentage of the ratepayers commute daily for work in larger centres such as Perth and Kingston, the imperative is to ensure that the back roads are passable in all but the most extreme weather events, and that hard top arterial roads can be traversed at a reasonable speed the vast majority of the time.

Fellows said that during the winter season, all road classes are patrolled around the clock, seven days a week. Snow clearing operations begin at approximately 3 cm of accumulation, well below the provincial threshold. Hard-surfaced roads are always prioritized first, followed by gravel and lower-volume roads. Contractors who work on smaller roads that cannot easily accommodate large plow trucks, are generally deployed two hours after township road crews.

During active snow events, crews respond as conditions allow.

To use the example of the January 15 storm, which was a significant event with a total snowfall of 20cm or more, throughout the township, “some crew members were deployed early in the morning on the 15th, to pre-treat hardtop roads with additional sand and salt. The remaining crews began plowing and sanding back roads at their regular start times, before cycling back to hardtop roads.”

Fellows said that about half of the road crew works from 3am - 3pm when it snows, and the other half, from 7am - 7pm.

During the daylong snow event, crews continually plowed Roads 38 and 509 throughout the day, while other crews began clearing the back roads later in the day.

All of the crews came back on shift at 3am, on Friday, January 16, to complete cleanup operations on both hardtop and back roads, which means that a significant number of crew members worked a 12 hour shift, until 7pm, and were back at work only 8 hours later, at 3am the next morning.

The township uses a salt and sand mix on all roads, with only enough salt in the mix to ensure that the sand does not freeze. Extra salt is added to the mix for hard-top and tar and chip roads, but not on gravel roads, because that would result in winter pot holes.

Fellows said that salt works much more slowly in colder weather, -9 or below, and that is why it can be difficult to keep major roads clear of ice, if the ice accumulates at colder temperatures.

There are 5 classes of roads in Ontario, according to the Municipal Act. Class 5 roads carry between 0 and 199 vehicles per day. Central Frontenac uses a Class 6 designation for a road that has as few as 4 vehicles per day.

Central Frontenac currently treats Class 5 and Class 6 roads the same as all other roads. These roads receive plowing and sanding well before the 24-hour mark and are also patrolled around the clock, seven days a week.

“Our Public Works crews are committed to keeping the community safe at all times. We maintain approximately 550 kilometres of roadway throughout the year. While response times can be impacted during major weather events, crews are always actively plowing, sanding, and treating roads in a safe and timely manner.”