Ministry evades interview on four-laning.

The Sault Ste. Marie Chamber of Commerce accuses the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO) of dragging its heels in completing a $53-million four-laning of a stretch of Highway 17, east of the city.

The four-laning has been on the province's planning books since the early 1970s and chamber president Gary Dumanski calls the pace of development "unusually slow" and questions the soundness of an eight-year construction timeline when compared to other four-laning projects across the North.

"We're seeing highway realignments being constructed in Parry Sound literally through solid rock at a hell of a lot faster pace of two to three years, and here they're talking five more years...and we've been at this for more than 10," Dumanski says.

Dumanski says he has grown "frustrated" at the slow advancement of funds by the province for each of the three phases involved in the 28-kilometre project. Instead, he says he has been getting the "standard answer from MTO about how much money has been spent and 'we're doing it as quickly as possible."'

Still, he has received no renewed commitments to speed up the realignment project and make it a priority item. The completed project will by-pass the village of the Garden River First Nations.

The need for a better access road into the city, leading to an eventual four-laning between the Sault and Sudbury, is a necessity from a safety and economic point of view, says Dumanski.

During the 2001 Civic Holiday long weekend, five residents of the Garden River First Nations were killed in a two-vehicle collision on the two-lane stretch near the village. Traffic was stalled for more than six hours.

When contacted, Ministry of Transportation officials, including an assistant district engineer in the Sault and a communications spokesperson in Thunder Bay, refused to consent to a phone interview with Northern Ontario Business, nor would they speak to the chamber's concerns, replying only by e-mail.

The ministry says plans are to have two lanes of the new highway open to two-way traffic by 2006 with all four lanes open by 2008.

"We believe this timing to be reasonable based on the engineering and property issues that must be addressed, as well as the complexity of designing and building a highway expansion project of this size," according to an e-mailed reply from Larry Lambert, regional director for the North-West Region.

The 28-kilometre, four-lane project is being built in three sections. To date, the 16-kilometre section within the Garden River First Nation, the largest and more complex of the sections, is underway, including the excavation of almost two million cubic metres of earth and the placement of about one million tonnes of granular material.

The property for a seven-kilometre section east of the village is secured and design work is underway. Funding will be put in place when the design work is completed and the contracts are tendered.

Negotiations to acquire property for a five-kilometre section heading into the city, which partly abuts the Batchewana First Nation, are ongoing "but are far from complete," writes the ministry in an e-mail. Design work, tendering and funding will be finalized once the land has been secured.

Selected to build the highway were a joint venture company of Garden River Constructors, overseers of the planning and design, and Peter Kiewit Sons' Ltd. of Omaha, Neb., one of North America's leading construction firms. The design-build agreement signed provides for a number of improvements including building bridges over the Root River, Belleau Creek, Garden River and the Echo River.

Waiting more than five years for a new highway that should have been completed years ago, is "just not acceptable," says Dumanski, who vows to continue lobbying the province to expedite the expansion by putting all the necessary funding in place to complete the property acquisition and design work.

Since 1972 the ministry has been planning to four-lane this section to connect with an existing 20-kilometre four-lane section of Highway 17 just east of the town of Echo Bay and west of the village of Desbarats that was completed in 1976.