As Portage la Prairie transitions into the colder months, the city’s streets are ready for winter after a bustling and productive construction season. Jocelyn Lequier-Jobin, the City’s Director of Operations, shared her excitement about the progress made.
“We're getting stuff wrapped up. We have our contractors out doing some final landscaping this week, line painting on the roads, all those kinds of things. We want to get done before the snow flies. We've had a really beautiful fall, which has been very helpful in getting everything wrapped up.”
This year saw one of the city’s most significant paving efforts, particularly on Saskatchewan Avenue West, which has been a long-awaited project for many residents.
“I've had a lot of people that are really happy with the new work that's gone in, especially on Saskatchewan Ave. That one's been a long time coming, so people have been really impressed with how nice everything is looking now that we're getting finished off.”
Crescent Road was another focus this season. While the city held off on repaving for a couple of years to avoid too many closures at once, they took the opportunity to make some big improvements.
“We did a full reconstruction there because Crescent Road is built alongside Crescent Lake. The underlying soils can move around a lot and settle differently. We tend to get a lot of cracks there. We decided to dig it out deeper than we would normally would and put in some Geogrid; a new technology that is sort of a plastic grid that goes underneath everything and holds it all together. We're really hoping that’s going to last a really long time now.”
As the city preps for winter, Lequier-Jobin said they’re focused on clearing leaves from drainage systems to keep roads as dry as possible.