Tecumseh's mayor calls a plan to upgrade and improve County Road 46 'all about being ready for the future.'
The Town of Tecumseh and Essex County Council have endorsed the recommendations laid out in a recently completed Environmental Assessment Report of County Road 46, which began in April 2024.
The assessment examined a stretch of the road between the City of Windsor limits and Manning Road, a route that will be eventually connected to the future Lauzon Parkway extension and new interchange at Highway 401.
Mayor Gary McNamara says this is a huge project with 7 to 8 kilometres of roadway.
"As a growing region, we're well over 420,000, 430,000, and continuing to grow. This is basically looking at the future," he says.
The proposed upgrades to County Road 46 include expanding it to four lanes to handle large vehicles, paved shoulders to accommodate cyclists, stormwater management ponds, the addition of roundabouts where County Road 46 meets with Concession Roads 8 and 9 along with improvements to both of those roads, and signalized intersections with Manning Road and the Lauzon extension.
The extension of Lauzon will help open up undeveloped land for commercial and residential purposes on both sides of the 401 in Windsor and Tecumseh.
McNamara calls it important to have these roads ready before trying to bring in big investments.
"A prime example of that is the NextStar plant on Banwell Road," he says. "It's a huge plant that's generating and will generate a lot of traffic, and here we are now doing the roads to accommodate that. It's a nice problem to have, but it creates a lot of anxiety in the community, detours, and so forth."
Work on a near $100 million overpass to accommodate traffic travelling between Tecumseh, Lakeshore, and Windsor, along with workers going to and from the NextStar electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant, is already underway, which has resulted in lane closures and major traffic delays in the area of Banwell Road and the E.C. Row Expressway.McNamara says this project is as important as any road expansion in the town's history.
"We are at the cusp of great things. We've been identified as one of the top places to invest, so we're preparing ourselves," he says.
Now that the recommendations have been approved following the environmental assessment, the next step is a mandatory 30-day public review period of the Environmental Study Report, followed by approval to move to the engineering design phase for the work.
McNamara says they will also need to secure funding for the road project.