"I have been dealing with a road that had recycled asphalt removed from .4 kms with nothing to replace it," Coun. Karen MacKenzie said, in a letter written to Premier Darrell Dexter, which was provided to the Truro Daily News.
"The residents living on this small portion of the 1.9 km road have requested recycled asphalt be put back down or failing that TIR (the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal) replace it with chip seal."
Area transportation manager James Webster said the department will pave or chip seal the road, but only if a majority of residents sign a petition in favour of such a move and the cost is shared 50/50 between the province and the municipality. Residents on Greg Road would then be billed for the municipal share under the area tax rate.
But MacKenzie said residents are adamantly against paying for an upgrade and want to have the .4 km section of road re-stored to its previous condition.
Greg Road is located between Greenfield Road and Old Greenfield Road and is officially listed as a J-class gravel road. It had been covered with a combination of recycled asphalt and concrete (RAC) mixture that the department had experimented with on a number of gravel roads.
The mixture does not hold together as well as regular pavement, however, and the department has generally stopped using the process.
After developing numerous potholes, the RAC material was removed from a .4 km section of Greg Road and returned to a regular gravel base. The remaining 1.5 km section of the road remains hard covered with the RAC material.
"We maintain that road," Webster said. "We treat it just like any other gravel road. Actually, it gets better treatment than most gravel roads," he said, of the grading and dust-control attention it receives. "It's actually a very good gravel road."
Resident James Geldart, however, disagrees.
"It's a step backwards," he said. "Why would they do that? Nobody was consulted about it. And when it did happen I contacted the Department of Transportation and I was told not to worry about, that the road would be better maintained after they were done with it than it ever was before."
Geldart said he doesn't know of any residents who asked for the RAC material to be removed and regardless of how well the gravelled portion is maintained, leaving a portion of the road without a hardtop is not acceptable.
"The issue here is not the maintenance of that, it's the fact that the residents, we want it put back to the condition with a covering over it that doesn't have to be graded," he said.
That is also the stance that MacKenzie has taken.
"I want the .4 (km. section) that you guys dug up fixed," she said, of the transportation department.
Truro Daily News
