The province is announcing some support for projects taking place in rural municipalities as part of a cooperative program with SARM. Their Rural Integrated Roads for Growth (RIRG) program will see $12.6 million coming from the province for a variety of road related projects, with $21.7 million coming from the rural municipalities.
One local project is the Bremen Grid Rock Grinding inside of the RM of Bayne No. 371 with a total cost of $1,275,000. With the RM providing $775,000 for the project and $500,000 provided by the Saskatchewan Government.
SARM President Bill Huber says that he's thankful for the funding which will help out these rural communities.
"We're fortunate and we're glad that there is more funding for the program, which we always need because we've got a lot of bridges that are in dire straits. 80 some percent of them are almost needing repair or beyond repair in some cases, so we're continually requesting funding for that program. That's good news to hear that there's more coming."
32 projects in total are being covered in this announcement, which Huber says is an average number that they'd see in a year.
He hopes to see more progress from the province in the future on this file.
"We're just hoping it continues, and we administer that program on behalf of the Department of Highways and we look forward to continuing that relationship. But it's always about money. We need more dollars because of inflation costs, and construction costs continually rising. So we need that, we got a lot of infrastructure that's needed repairing."
SARM is also meeting with some of its local delegates over the next few days as its annual convention gets underway.
With files from Blaine Weyland