Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll provide a little bit of background on the Access Road Program. Within the Department of Transportation we do have a Community Local Access Road Program. It’s in our O and M. It’s been mentioned here. There’s about $300,000 in that budget. It allows us to provide contributions to half a dozen or eight communities, about $40,000 a year. Its main purpose is to provide funding to communities in the
form of contributions so that they can construct a trail or an access road to a nearby attraction, recreation area, traditional area, that kind of thing. The Member is correct; funding for that is very limited. It’s generally oversubscribed and hard to get a lot of work done for $40,000, but we have made some good progress over a number of years working with communities.
In terms of the access road projects that are within the capital plan, those actually came out of a special initiative of the 15th Legislative Assembly
when there was some capital funding identified for public highway access roads; specifically, Nahanni Butte, Hay River Reserve and Jean Marie River. There are still some remnants of the capital dollars in the budget here. Nahanni Butte, we were hoping it would be done this year. We got a little bit of weather challenges at the end, but it should be done early next year. It has a little bit of cleanup work to do, so there’s still some ongoing capital here. Same with Hay River Reserve, there’s still some more work to do on that. In Jean Marie, just because of the standard that it’s constructed, we do need a modest amount of capital every year to keep that project going, to keep the road going.
In terms of gravel access, there is no program in DOT for constructing gravel access roads. We do work with Public Works and Services, with the Housing Corporation and the communities to coordinate the gravel requirements of the various GNWT departments. We work with communities so that we can provide a coordinated project when that makes sense to do that. But within DOT we certainly do take care of our own gravel needs. We have many of those for our highway system and then for our airports.
The Tuk gravel access road, again, it was a special initiative of the 16th Assembly. We were able to
identify some funding under the Build Canada. We did have the strong support of Members to move forward with that. We, as a department, were very interested, because it is on the future Mackenzie Valley road alignment and we saw it as another positive way to demonstrate the government’s support to that, building the road. Thank you.