MORRISBURG – After striking out on two grant applications, the Acting CAO for South Dundas says the municipality will have to start talking with the St. Lawrence Parks Commission and the United Counties about the long term restoration of Upper Canada Road.
The municipality was denied funding through the Canada 150 federal grant and didn’t get anything in the latest round from OCIF (Ontario Community Infrastructure Fund).
“There’s been some discussions with our public works manager that we are going to start creating some dialogue with the counties and with the parks (commission) to look at possibly going ahead and doing some work in our budgets,” Shannon Geraghty said in an interview with Cornwall Newswatch.
Geraghty said there’s another possibility for grant money as another round of funding was recently released.
“I think we need to be pro-active and start looking at putting money away now and doing it, whether it’s next year or 2017,” he said.
The Acting CAO said the municipality needs to take control of the situation, which has be dragging on since the months before the municipal election.
In the fall of 2014, the municipality learned it was the owner of the road – and had been since 1975 – through the St. Lawrence Parks Commission had been maintaining it. The commission now wants to shed its responsibility for the route.
“We need to start looking at it because it’s not getting any better,” Geraghty said.
In June, the township had applied for one-third funding ($300,000) to repair the road, with the hope the parks commission would also pitch in a third.
There’s roughly $1 million in repairs needed to Upper Canada Road, an arterial road between Highway 401 and County Road 2 and a pipeline for traffic to Upper Canada Village.
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