Ever get the feeling that Greater Sudbury roads are getting worse all the time?
If so, you’d be correct in that assessment.
Only a fraction of what the City of Greater Sudbury needs to spend on municipal roads to keep them in their current overall condition is being expended.
Last year, $21 million was spent on asphalt rehabilitation.
This, against an annual estimated expenditure of $110 million which is required to maintain Greater Sudbury roads in their current overall condition across all three road classifications (listed in order of use, these include arterial, collector and local roads).
With annual expenditures cyclical and projects typically carrying over multiple years, city project manager Miranda Edwards said multi-year averages are more viable figures to draw conclusions from.
Even so, the city’s average annual expenditure of $32.2 million remains $77.8 million shy of its $110-million target.
The city’s elected officials were updated on the city’s roads asset management plan during a recent operations committee meeting.
Edwards joined AECOM asset management lead Christian Lombard in walking city council members through an update of the city’s roads asset management plan, which AECOM was enlisted to take care of and is slated to set road condition targets and funding requirements.
With Greater Sudbury roads underfunded to the tune of approximately $77.8 million annually, Lombard said, “There are some hard conversations to be had … but this is not insurmountable."
Suggested solutions included downgrading paved roads to gravel, reducing the city’s network of roads to bring the number down to a level Greater Sudbury can better afford, and advocating for more funding from senior levels of government.
“I don’t know where we’re going to get $80 million a year to get there,” Coun. Pauline Fortin said. “This is very troubling.”
The issue isn’t limited to any one area of the city, she said, noting that along some stretches of Paris Street, “You can’t even drive on the right-hand lane.”
At the current funding rate, local roads are slated to degrade from “Fair” to “Poor” pavement condition index by approximately 2032.
Collector roads will degrade from near the top of the “Fair” threshold to the classification’s bottom, near “Poor,” by the end of the 10 years, while arterial roads will degrade from mid-"Good” to close to “Fair” by the end of the time period.
Prior to Monday’s update, the city’s latest annual asphalt rehabilitation expenditure requirement estimate, according to a 2021 report, was $80 million.
The updated annual price tag of $110 million tabled on Monday comes within an economic landscape in which costs have skyrocketed.
In 2013, the cost per square metre to crack seal was $6, which hit $16 by last year.
The cost for road rehabilitation was $106 per square metre in 2013 ($261 in 2024), and reconstruction was $291 per square metre (last year, it was $768).
In recent years, the city has prioritized those roads with heavier traffic (arterials), meaning that less-travelled local roads are in the worst shape.
While 75 per cent of arterial roads are in either good or very good condition, only 36 per cent of collector and local roads are in as good of shape.
Among arterial roads, seven per cent are in poor or very poor condition, while 31 per cent of collector roads and 34 per cent of local roads have degraded to this classification.
“You’re trying to not let your assets dip into poor quality,” city Growth and Infrastructure general manager Tony Cecutti told city council members last month, explaining that once they reach this state they’re “prohibitively expensive.”
Once roads hit poor condition they tend to stay that way, he said, because they can’t really get any worse, which is why the city prioritizes good- and fair-condition roads.
The degradation of Greater Sudbury roads is part of a broader annual infrastructure gap which city staff estimated in late 2023 to be approximately $130 million.
Within the report, Edwards and Lombard laid out additional context regarding the 3,675 kilometres of road lanes Greater Sudbury takes care of, which they noted would reach Kamloops, B.C., if laid out straight across Canada.
The financial figures addressed in Monday’s presentation highlight asphalt rehabilitation expenditures in isolation, and Cecutti noted that much more has been spent on city roads via such things as curbs, bridges and other linear infrastructure.
Coun. Deb McIntosh, who chairs the city’s finance committee, also noted that the city is ramping up infrastructure spending with a special capital levy.
This year’s 4.8 per cent tax levy increase, for example, includes a 1.5-per-cent special capital levy earmarked for roads.
These 1.5 per cent annual increases compound each year and are slated to bring in $86 million after five years, and $375 million after 10 years.
Although there’s much more the city needs to do, she said, “It’s not that we’ve been doing nothing.”
Slowly ramping up road investments on a gradual basis is a solid approach, Cecutti said, noting that with a clear long-term municipal vision and multi-year budgeting, contractors can steadily build up the complement of staff and equipment they need to tackle these larger future projects.
Taken aback by the annual funding gap, Mike Parent said he’s seeing “alarms going off, because if we don’t do something, year over year this conversation's going to get less comfortable for all of us.”
He said he’d work to put a resolution together which requests staff to tackle the situation head-on.
“We need to find and lobby for more money, but we also need to really ask ourselves every time we build a road, why are we doing this?” he said.
The city needs to reduce its road network, he added, “That’s not even a choice, that’s obvious.”
During Monday’s meeting, Cecutti also said that city council members should “resist the temptation” to expand the municipality’s settlement boundaries by approving developments outside of lands already allocated for associated purposes.
“That’s putting pressure on your ability to maintain your road network,” he said.
Since they were elected to council chambers more than two years ago, the current batch of city council members have consistently voted to approve applications to develop lands outside of settlement boundaries.
Denying applications to develop lands outside of settlement areas is “a tough thing to do, and I know there’s a desire to increase jobs and increase development potential, but you have to understand the fullness of the implications of those decisions,” Cecutti said.
The city’s degrading roads and the expense required to maintain them, he added, “brings home the true cost of those decisions.”
Within Monday’s report to city council members, one chart appeared to contradict the notion that city roads were degrading.
This chart showed the city’s overall pavement condition index increase slightly from 2019 to 2023.
This, despite annual asphalt rehabilitation expenditures consistently remaining below both the current $110-million annual estimate and the previously estimated $80-million figure needed to keep the city’s pavement quality index at its current overall state.
In fact, annual expenditures peaked in 2019 at only $62 million.
The jump in the city’s overall pavement condition index came as a result of an influx of gas tax funding which the city used to upgrade such arterial roads as The Kingsway, Regent Street and Barrydowne Road.
Asphalt rehabilitation expenditures for better-quality arterial roads such as these go a lot further in boosting the city’s overall pavement condition index than investments in lower-quality collector and local roads, Edwards told Sudbury.com after Monday’s meeting, since roads get exponentially more expensive to repair as they degrade.
As such, recent years’ investments in these arterial roads had a disproportionate impact on the city’s overall pavement condition index, during which the pavement condition index for arterials increased and the pavement condition index of less-prioritized collector and local roads dropped.
With this cash influx spent, the city’s overall pavement condition index is back en route to drop until such time as the $77.8-million annual funding gap is filled.
This funding gap represents what is needed to maintain current pavement condition index ratings across all three road classifications, including arterial roads in mid-”Good” condition and collector and local roads in high “Fair” condition.
The next report on the city’s roads asset management plan will include data which shows the projected impacts of recent city council decisions, including the 1.5-per-cent special capital levy, which McIntosh said should begin to at least partially pare down the funding gap.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
