‘There will be disruption:’ City of Regina officially kicks off construction season

Though the bright orange signs have been splitting up and pausing traffic across Regina for weeks now, the city officially kicked off construction season Friday morning.

Several major construction projects — including one on McCarthy Boulevard, one on Albert Street and one on Lewvan Drive — started earlier this week. A four-year project to completely redo 11th Avenue downtown will start next Monday, closing the road from Broad Street to Hamilton Street for the rest of the season.

Kim Onrait, the executive director of city services with the City of Regina, said this is going to be a very busy construction season for the city with $113 million worth of work being done — $13 million more than last year.

“And it’s all necessary to keep our city moving and ensure critical infrastructure is ready to deliver services our residents expect,” said Onrait.

With so much work needing to happen in such a short construction season, Onrait admits there will be traffic congestion.

“In Regina, we have winter and we have construction season, so we have a very short window to do a maximum amount of work,” he explained.

But he said they’re always reviewing what’s happening.

“If there’s a plan laid out and that plan is not working, our teams are very flexible in how they will deal with that,” Onrait said.

With these larger projects, he said the city departments work together with utilities like SaskPower and SaskTel to do all the necessary work in that area at once instead of coming back three or four times to do different things.

“All of that is pulled together to lessen the disruption, also understanding that there will be disruption,” he said.

This year, some of the larger projects are happening in the same areas at the same time, so it’s funneling drivers onto the same roads to get around it — like the construction on McCarthy and Albert pushing drivers onto Lewvan, which also has construction further south, or the 11th Avenue work, and work later in the season on Dewdney potentially pushing more drivers onto Saskatchewan Drive.

Onrait said that when officials plan and prioritize, they start with road conditions and teams pull information together.

“Sometimes they will have to align projects that are in a quadrant that are major projects if they have to be done in a particular year together and can’t be spaced out over that time,” he said.

In other words, Onrait said it can be unavoidable.

“Sometimes the timing can’t be split out for a variety of reasons,” he said.

Much of this capital construction work is not being done by city crews; it’s being done by contractors who’ve bid for the work. Onrait said there’s so much work that city workers would never be able to get all of it done.

Chris Warren, the city’s director of roadways and transportation, said the city works to maximize the time it has when the roads are closed to reduce the impact to the public.

“(We’re) ensuring that our workers are working longer hours (and) that we’re providing seven-day construction coverage. With our contracts, we’re adding bonuses for early completion as well as penalties for missing deadlines,” said Warren.

Onrait also said that sometimes they even have areas blocked off a week in advance of work because they want to have the area cleared for when crews arrive and they don’t always know when they’re going to get there.

Onrait encourages people to go to the city’s website for road closures and work to plan out their routes.