A delay for a major road reconstruction project in east Windsor.
Ward 8 city councillor Gary Kaschak confirms work on Lauzon Parkway between Hawthorne Drive and Cantelon Drive will not finish on time this year and is now expected to be completed in the spring of 2025.
"It looks like the southbound lanes in that area are going to be completed this year but it looks like we're going to have to go into the spring of next year, 2025 April to kind of complete the northbound lanes," says Kaschak. "Any time you dig up roads and you get into underground, you always seem to run into issues the engineers tell us."
The road reconstruction project with the exception of boulevard restoration and infill concrete medians was set to wrap up sometime in December but Kaschak says the constructor has run into some problems.
"Some problems with conduit and some cave-ins in certain areas and the real real important thing here is that pouring concrete has to be conducive to exactly the right temperature and it's going to be tricky moving forward," says Kaschak.
He says the delay is unfortunate.
"We want to get it right," says Kaschak. "The last thing we want to do and this has happened in the city before where you try and rush something to get it and done and then two years later, you find out that the cement went bad and you got to chop it all up and inconvenience people again and also you don't want to waste taxpayer dollars here right."
This is the third phase of the Lauzon Parkway Sewer and Road Rehabilitation project.
The third phase started the week of June 24 and is an $18-million project.
Kaschak doesn't believe the delay will impact the cost of the phase.
Phase 1 saw $2.6 million invested to fully rebuild the north and southbound lanes of Lauzon Parkway from Tecumseh Road East to Hawthorne Drive while phase 2 cost about $5.5 million to rebuild the north and southbound lanes of Lauzon Parkway from the E.C. Row Expressway to Cantelon Drive.
Each phase has included reconstructing lanes of concrete road, widening some parts to four lanes, installing an open-graded drainage layer beneath the road's surface to improve drainage of excess water to minimize flooding and improve road performance, rebuilding the multi-use asphalt trail on the east side of Lauzon Parkway, and replacing the concrete sidewalk on the west side.
Phase one began in 2021.
Roughly 30,000 vehicles, including heavy trucks, use Lauzon Parkway daily to get to or from the E.C. Row Expressway.