Last September it was announced Battleford's roads would be scanned with an Automatic Road Analyzer in order to asses the condition of the substructure.
Town council signed off on the analysis conducted by Catterall and Wright consultants with the intention of obtaining a comprehensive report of the roads' condition to schedule repairs.
Engineers finalized this road condition report last week and the topic returned to town council Monday to be included in the Town asset management plan.
Town CAO John Enns-Wind commented at the last council meeting that with the data from the street condition index report, road maintenance would be scheduled by "fact-based decisions" as much as possible, with road work planned when the surface structure and substructure get to the same point of deterioration.
"What we want to prevent is not knowing that our subsurface is in awful shape and paving over that and having to rip it up in a year or two," Enns-Wind said.
The report also outlines a five-year plan, as well as a longer-term plan, for road maintenance. At $78,000 for the initial road scanning, Councillor Boutin-Gervais wondered how the report varied from the previous road maintenance plan.
The difference, said Enns-Wind, is the comprehensive overview of the report.
"The map will be more complex because it will show surface and subsurface and we can expand it to include facilities and things like that."
The Town's asset management plan has also not been a topic new to town council. In order to be eligible for some tax programs, including the gas tax, the Town must demonstrate before 2018 it has an asset management plan in place. Councillors voted unanimously in support of the recommendation.
"This is how we can start our asset management plan for the Town," Enns-Wind said of administration's recommendation to include the road condition index in the asset management plan.
