A petition signed by Rainbow Drive residents to stop the reconfiguration and expansion of the parking lot at cole Lac Des Bois elementary school has been steamrolled.
Construction crews arrived Tuesday morning at the school and began tearing up pavement on the existing lot to replace it with a larger one-way access lot school officials say will help alleviate congestion problems and improve safety for arriving students.
But Mary-Jane Fournier sees it as an opportunity wasted, one that will result in unnecessary spending by the school district. She objected to School District 57's plan to redesign the parking lot while keeping Rainbow Drive as the access road to the school. Fournier wanted school officials to instead use Ospika Boulevard as the entrance/exit point to the school. She had the support of 20 Rainbow Drive residents fed up with traffic on their streets during school days and the problems it causes when they try to leave for work from their driveways.
Fournier, who lives across the street from the school, said the problem has existed since the fall of 2010, when more parents began driving their kids to and from Lac Des Bois once it opened as a K-7 French immersion choice elementary school, replacing the former Lakewood junior secondary school.
On a few occasions, Fournier said people trying to park have pushed garbage bins onto the lawns of the residents to create another parking spot on the street. She said the situation worsens in the wintertime, when snow gets ploughed away from the school sidewalk to the residents' side of the street.
"It's an extreme safety hazard and we've all been looking for solutions," said Fournier. "Everybody wanted it on Ospika Boulevard. We were expecting to be consulted for our input but we never were able to."
The new lot will have space for 72 parking stalls, 26 more than the 46-spot lot it replaces. The project was approved by the school board last winter.
On Sunday, Fournier urged SD 57 superintendent Brian Pepper to have the $400,000 project put on hold. She also contacted contractor Klein Construction, which agreed to put off the construction for a day while an alternate plan was considered, but by then it was too late. Fournier said she was told by Terry Fjellstrom of project designers L&M Engineering Ltd. that it was not typical design practice to put in a parking lot access off an arterial road.
"My question is, how come the churches have it, the funeral home has it and Tim Hortons, which isn't even on Ospika, was approved for an access off Ospika," she said.
The school's playground, which was installed last year, and a chain-link fence will have to be moved to make way for the lot. Fournier said the costs of moving those structures would be saved if the lot access was off Ospika.
"I would think you could put in a 72-stall lot of half of what it's is costing them," she said. "This plan is only net gain of 26 stalls and if you divide that into $400,000, that works out $15,384 per stall."
When complete, the entrance to the one-way lot will be opposite the Reid Crescent- Rainbow Drive intersection. Cars will enter the lot from one designated entrance and flow through to a designated exit point. Pepper said traffic congestion, student safety, water drainage and neighbourhood concerns were taken into account when designing the lot.
"The hope is with the extra stalls, the angle of the stalls, [and that] we'll have sidewalks on both sides so people can move down the parking lot to a crosswalk inside the school property, this will allow a lot easier access into the school and we hope it will mitigate some of the congestion issues," Pepper said.
Al Clark, the city's manager of subdivision and infrastructure, says there is nothing preventing the school district from creating its parking lot access points on Ospika. But the city follows federal guidelines, which recommend avoiding disruptions to higher-flow traffic volumes to decrease the likelihood of vehicle collisions. Clark said the city will work with the school district to create road signs to prevent motorists from parking on Rainbow Drive during peak school hours.
SD 57 trustee Kate Cooke, whose children attend Lac Des Bois, said she supported having the lot access off Ospika, which would leave the existing lot untouched and create even more parking space. The current school enrollment of 330 students is projected to increase to 500 at Lac Des Bois by 2018.
