City staff are digging up ways to get the most out of the Prince George road rehab budget.
In a report submitted for tonight's council meeting, city operations superintendent Bill Gaal said administration is evaluating a number of options to get more paving accomplished in a season.
These options include developing a gravel source suitable for asphalt manufacture, creating a business model for operating the city's own portable asphalt plant and looking for a decision from the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure on combining asphalt tenders.
At the June 11 meeting, councillors sat through a presentation about the city's roads where they learned it costs approximately $14,600 per week to run two shifts of pothole patching crews and that the cold asphalt patch costs the city $685 per tonne.
Prince George also pays about 30 per cent more in asphalt to repair roads than municipalities in the Okanagan.
Coun. Brian Skakun is in favour of the city investigating the ways and means to establishing its own asphalt plant.
"My goal is the get the discussion going because, in my opinion, there's not enough competition for asphalt and we're paying substantially more than other areas of the province," Skakun said. "I'm thinking we really need to look and have a community discussion on whether it's time to perhaps produce our own asphalt."
The councillor has been in touch with the cities of Edmonton and Vancouver, both of which operate their own asphalt businesses.
Though it has operated its own plant for decades, Vancouver re-evaluated its asphalt and aggregate operation when faced with an aging plant in the mid-1990s.
In an administrative report from 1996 states that "when comparing all costs, including land, interest, capital construction, operating, taxes, etc. that the city option is far superior" to farming out asphalt needs to Columbia Bitulithic -the company which currently has the tender to repair P.G. roads.
The city of Vancouver facility (including an material testing lab and consulting services) cost more than $13 million, but was also expected to save the city the same amount over a 25-year span.
"The mortgage, the property, everything to get the plant going is all paid for within the asphalt price they sell to the community," said Skakun. "I think, economically, we really need to look into this."
He also said that in Edmonton there is more of a focus on cold patching in the winter with their asphalt production and that there are a number of options if the capacity to produce asphalt was in place.
"There could be a combination of having a portable asphalt plant come and increase the competition during the summer; we could do more of producing our own asphalt during the cold months; or it could just be a plant where we could actually sell [asphalt], not to ourselves, but to the community."
Skakun, who has brought up the idea of a city-owned asphalt plant in the past, said he has brought this information to Mayor Shari Green and his fellow councillors and hopes to see it brought before council sooner rather than later.
"If it isn't through the mayor's office, I'll bring back something myself at least within the next month so that if there is going to be some preliminary work, we can get that going by the end of July and hopefully get moving - if we do anything - before the next paving season," he said.
