Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are maintaining Highway No. 7. We’re hoping that all of the areas that were identified as very bad spots are going to be attended to sooner rather than later, although our concentration is going to be in around fixing that highway and finishing the chipseal to Liard from BC, from Liard over to Nahanni, and there will be lots of BCP money going in there.
Other areas where there are soft spots – and it was a major concern when we were in Fort Liard, where it’s very bad and we’re aware of it – the guys and the department from Simpson seem very aware of it so we will be paying attention to that.
The Trout Lake Airport, the ATB is something we had initially planned in the process. It was part of the planning process, but the airport construction consumed all of the budget and we had to find additional funds just to finish the airport work itself.
The ATB, I do believe we had budgeted about $400,000. So that is something we are doing. We are looking internally now as we move money into that area to finish the airstrip itself, we’re looking for money internally to do some work so something can be done this summer, some of the work. Otherwise, we are also, as a backup, going through the process to re-enter it into the capital planning process, although it’s been through there once already.
As far as a snow blower goes, so far for strips this size we haven’t provided snow blowers. They are expensive pieces of equipment, but what we’ve agreed to do is monitor it through the full winter season and see how it went. If there were issues with the equipment they have, if it caused any deals or issues with planes landing and so on after this construction season, if the problems were there, then we would certainly consider maybe an alternative solution. I don’t know if that would be a snow blower or better equipment, but we will monitor that for that reason.
The Wrigley/Simpson highway, right now we’re maintaining the highway, maintenance only. There’s not a lot of capital money going into that.
It’s mostly and all to do with volume of traffic. During the winter months when the highway is open to Norman Wells, Good Hope and so on, when the highway opens to the Sahtu the volume goes up when the highway is frozen. So it doesn’t have the type of impact that it would when driving it in the summertime. Then in the summertime the volume is low. Those are things we consider when we consider spending capital on highways. We will continue to monitor that. As the Mackenzie Highway comes closer to construction, then we would be upgrading that portion and it would be unwise not to upgrade the first section of the new highway going into Norman Wells.