It’s been four years and has taken much prodding from local municipal leaders to see action on the twinning of Highway 59 from Île-des-Chênes to Highway 52. To date, the project hasn’t even reached a functional design study stage.
“There’s more and more traffic in the southeast and, to make things safer, we just have to start adding more roadways,” says Hanover Reeve Stan Toews.
On January 14, Toews submitted a letter to the Honourable Ron Schuler, Minister of Infrastructure for the province, making a formal request that funding for the study be included in the upcoming 2019 budget, to be released this spring.
“Our municipality, along with our neighbouring municipal governments, has been seeking the province’s assurances to have capital funds set aside to undertake this study as the starting block for this provincial infrastructure investment,” Toews told Schuler. “As your department’s recent 2017 traffic study had concluded, Highway 59 continues to be one of the province’s highways that sees the most increase in vehicular count increases year after year.”
The initiative for the twinning of Highway 59 south of Île-des-Chênes began in 2015 when representatives from five municipalities along with the towns of Niverville and St. Pierre-Jolys formed a group called the Highway 59 Partners. Their objective was to address the needs of all communities in the southeast in terms of twinning the highway.
“First it’s a functional study to see where the highway would go, where it would make sense for all the municipalities involved and where it would cause the least amount of disruption to residents who already live there,” said Mona Fallis, former St. Pierre-Jolys mayor and spokesperson for Partners, in 2016.
In 2015, the Partners met with Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation (MIT) to encourage the twinning project, as well as to promote conversation with the province before a plan is acted on. Fallis was hopeful after that meeting, suggesting that once dialogue has begun, progress can be made.
The Citizen reached out to the executive director of construction and maintenance for MIT, Larry Halayko, in January 2016. He responded by saying that the province was planning a functional design study of this stretch of highway in 2017. This study would provide them with information regarding highway alignment, right-of-way requirements, and cost estimates.
Now, three years later, the project is still in limbo.
“We’re just asking that they set aside money to start the process of twinning 59 highway,” Toews says. “They first have to do a study before they’ll do the twinning and, at this point, they haven’t set money aside to do the study. We have to keep asking. Hopefully they’ll do that study one of these years.”
