Upgrades to sewers and streets necessary, city says
By Chandra Price
A substantial increase in Centretown road construction, that has been going on for several months, is upsetting area residents and keeping customers away from small businesses.
“It’s driving everybody crazy …it’s a nuisance,” says Geoff Dooling, owner of The Little More Corner Store at the corner of Arlington and Percy streets.
“They blocked off the access from Bronson to Arlington in the summer, where you couldn’t go down the street without being fined $105,” he adds, “so instead of driving one block from Bronson, customers would’ve had to drive eight blocks past another corner store to get to mine…which isn’t realistic.”
Dooling says the ongoing construction on Percy is not only annoying as a resident of the street, it is detrimental to his business.
He says he has lost at least 15 to 20 per cent of his business since construction began in early June.
The technical field and services engineer for the City of Ottawa, Paul Sauve, acknowledges there has been a definite increase in road construction in the Centretown area this year. But he says it is an older part of the city and the sewage and water systems have to be upgraded.
Various streets including Percy, Frank, MacLaren, Rochester, Booth and Primrose are being renewed by the City of Ottawa.
“It is difficult to put a handle on how much money businesses have lost due to construction,” says Sauve. “Especially when the economy is so low…maybe these businesses would have lost money with or without construction.”
Sauve says the city doesn’t plan on compensating small businesses for possible losses.
Nevertheless, small business owners feel the construction is having a negative impact on them.
“From the point of view of a small business that is on a street that is virtually closed for the whole summer…your business is very bad,” says Arlington Books’ store owner Gail Graser.
“Presumably all of the engineers have not been able to figure out a way to do it in a co-ordinating manner,” she adds.
Neighbors living in the area are as distraught about the construction as businesses are.
Resident Anna Simon says the construction begins at 6 a.m., and disturbs her sleep “all the time…early in the morning and late at night.”
Simon lives on the corner of McLeod and Percy, right in the centre of the overhaul. She says she is looking forward to its completion at the end of this month.
Sauve says the construction has to be finished before the winter comes. He says the old systems were built around the turn of the century with materials of an inferior quality that need to be replaced.
Sauve says the overall project is quite extensive and the city is spending approximately two-thirds of its $15-million annual construction budget in the Centretown area.
“The main reason we are going in there is not for the roads themselves but for the underground stuff,” says Sauve. “But once you start digging under there, the roads are totally destroyed…and we have to rebuild the roads.” Graser says she understands that the sewage and water systems have to be updated because they are hazardous, but says she doesn’t feel that it should take several months.