As we approach midsummer, the Town of Niverville is in the process of making a number of improvements to town infrastructure.
Earlier this month, the town completed roadwork at intersection of Main Street and Prairie Trail. In addition to road improvements, the main goal was to improve sidewalk access to the west side of town.
“The sidewalk there will get people to and from the community, and students to and from the high school,” says Niverville Mayor Myron Dyck. “We had a sidewalk on the south side of Main Street, but we did not have one on the north side. And so that whole intersection enhancement was basically to get that sidewalk built so people can walk the north side of Main Street without having to cross the street to get to the CRRC, the high school, and so on and so forth.”
For the last four years, the town has also been undergoing major sidewalk upgrades along Main Street, completing one or two blocks per summer. This year, the money that would normally be spent on new Main Street sidewalks has been directed to sidewalk work along Arena Road, which will improve pedestrian connectivity to and from the high school and CRRC.
As for the progress of the CRRC, Dyck says construction is still on schedule and the facility should be ready to open in March or April of next year.
Motorists will also have noticed the roadwork at the corner of Main Street and Third Avenue South, which began in early July. Dyck says the work at that location mainly has to do with improving the culverts and drainage.
Meanwhile, in Hespeler Park, changes are taking place to the main roundabout. The old configuration had traffic around the roundabout moving in two lanes, with people being able to park on the outside and traffic being able to drive on the inside.
“That’ll now be restricted to one-lane and one-direction,” says Dyck. “No parking in the roundabout anymore. And we’re connecting the sidewalk to the picnic shelter. With the lights that we’ve been installing there, it’s just, again, more for pedestrian traffic and moving people through the park and being able to enjoy it that way. We have adequate parking in two parking lots, so just no more parking on the roundabout.”
Two other projects on the town’s radar are an improved water treatment plant and a regional approach to wastewater management.
“We [recently] passed a couple hundred thousand dollars in engineering to expand our water treatment plant,” Dyck says. “We have the wells now to give us the water, but we need the production to be able to produce the reverse osmosis water.”
The current reservoir allows for the storage of 1.8 million litres of water. As the town grows, Dyck says a larger reservoir will become necessary.
The other project is the proposed Red-Seine-Rat Wastewater Cooperative, a project which would merge Niverville, the RM of Hanover, the RM of Ritchot, and the RM of Tache into a single mechanized wastewater treatment system. The centralized wastewater treatment plant would be built at the site of Niverville’s lagoon, north of town.
That proposal was announced last December, and the province hasn’t yet made any decisions about it.