Penny residents were told their only access road wasn't worth a plugged nickel, but after the community gave its two cents, the powers that be bought them some more time.
There are about half a dozen people who live full time in the hamlet on the north side of the Fraser River as it runs from the Rocky Mountain headwaters to Prince George, where it veers south. The geography is important, because the river and the rail line were the only way to travel the landscape in the early 20th century, and Penny was established for that reason.
It is one of the suite of communities set up on the northern leg of the Fraser especially to service the railroad and the forest industry alongside the rails. Some other names on that stretch include Hansard, McGregor, Sinclair Mills, Longworth, Loos, Dome Creek, Crescent Spur, Dewey, Legrand, Lamming Mills and eventually McBride.
Communities located on the south shore of the river are easily connected to Highway 16. Many of the communities on the north shore are linked by backcountry gravel roads or resource roads with bridges out to mainstream centres (either Prince George or McBride). Penny's only access was by rail, or by boat over the Fraser.
That changed in 1995 when Penny held a village reunion, and hundreds of people sharing roots to that tiny town came back for festivities celebrating their beloved home. The influx was too great for the boat link. Some members of the full-time residency joined forces to bulldoze a road from the downtown to some patchwork logging roads. In that way, the one and only road was finally established.
Clarence Boudreau was the driving force of that grassroots construction effort. After the road was built, he and Bob Gobbi were the ones largely responsible for keeping it graded in summer, plowed in winter, and free of fallen trees and floodwater erosion and whatnot.
It took countless hours of personal time, burning their own fuel, using their own hydraulic oil, their own replacement parts all on their own heavy machinery and unbelievable amounts of gravel donated by Boudreau himself.
Sometimes people from Penny (there are more than 40 homes used intermittently, especially in the recreational buzz of summer) would tuck some cash into their pockets as a thank-you. CN Rail would pay them fuel money every couple of years in appreciation for the track access they provided. But to call it 20-plus years of personal donation would be an understatement as tall as Grizzly Bear Mountain.
Eventually Boudreau was unable to continue the ad hoc road maintenance, and a year ago Gobbi announced that he could no longer subsidize the community out of his own retirement pocket. It was suggested to the provincial government that after 22 years of private investment and all the heavy lifting to establish the road, it was more than fair for the public sector to now take it over and maintain it like all the other northside roads.
The provincial government and its contractor YRB (Yellowhead Road & Bridge) talked amongst themselves and came back with an answer: no.
Those two letters meant Penny would be back to the days of fording rivers and riding the rails the second the first tree fell across the pathway or the first snowfall stuck to the ground this winter.
Supporters of Penny launched a petition last week and hundreds of signatures piled up. MLA Shirley Bond heard about the dilemma and made some calls of inquiry.
The Ministry of Transportation and YRB exchanged information. By the Easter break, the residents of Penny had an egg of good news.
The ministry has met with representatives and have been working to find a long term solution on access to the community of Penny, east of Prince George," The Citizen was told by ministry contacts in Victoria.
"In the short term, the ministry will work with our local highway maintenance contractor, YRB Road and Bridge, to provide basic maintenance on the road for the next two years. Any potential costs involved in the process will be determined during this two year process. We are hopeful that we can use that time to work with everyone involved to find a long-term solution for road access to Penny."
The stretch of road in question is about 13 kilometres long and, said residents of Penny, YRB and the ministry are obligated to maintain a four kilometre stretch anyway so how else would they get the plows and graders into the area anyway?
"It was excuse, excuse, excuse for the longest time instead of 'let's solve the problem' like we did," said Boudreau.
"Maybe this is just about money, but when you think about all the money Clarence and I have put in, that just doesn't make any actual sense," said Gobbi.
"We are handing them a free road. It needs a lot of work, but it's a passable road, and we have done quite a job with a lot of community support - culverts, ditches, gravel, years and years of maintenance - so it's hard to imagine them saying no to it."
There is one primary reason the ministry balked at taking it on, and from a legal standpoint it is a fair point to pause over, the community members admitted.
"This is not a public road, and while we are looking at temporary measures to improve basic road maintenance, this access traverses through sections of private land, and there are complicated access issues involved in road status," said the ministry contacts.
"It crosses private property and travels on CN property a bit," Boudreau confirmed.
"I've got the letter here where CN thanks us for the road, and they've contributed fuel to us so we could keep it going. The biggest use of private property is mine and I offered to donate the right-of-way for free. There are just two little pieces other than that. One landowner is fully agreeable and the other one must have given permission at some point because that was the part that was a logging road before we connected it all up. We didn't build that part of the road."
"It's funny," Gobbi added. "The government said it's not a road, but how did all those logging blocks get laid out? How did the treeplanting get done? There have been ag leases in the area. A lot of government driving got done on something that wasn't an official road."
Boudreau and Gobbi always felt they were official. They dubbed themselves The Department of Sideways for the all-so-real mimicry of government roadbuilders they were doing.
Now they have the relief of knowing a two-year effort is being invested by the real transportation personnel, and that could smooth the way for a bona fide permanent road into Penny for the first time in its long history.
