WESTLOCK – While a roughly one-kilometre stretch of Highway 44 in front of the Westlock County Industrial Park will be upgraded this year to include turning lanes, new lights and a service road on the east side of the highway, more work further south will also happen as turning lanes will be added north of the Pickardville turnoff, while an “intersection treatment plan” is also slated for Township Road 594.
Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock MLA Glenn van Dijken confirmed the additional work April 18, saying it’ll be completed over the next two construction seasons, 2023-2024, and is intended to “help increase both traffic safety and vehicle flow.” While the Alberta Transportation and Economic Corridors document lists the specific location for 2.2 kilometres of southbound passing lanes on Highway 44 south at kilometre markers 56.718 to 59.100, van Dijken could only confirm it’ll be north of the Pickardville turnoff. Meanwhile, Township Road 594 is slated for an “intersection treatment plan” — in the summer of 2018, the province spent $21.5 million repaving 38 kilometres of Highway 44 up to that road. According to signage on Highway 44 erected April 25, work is slated to run May 3 to June 28.
Industrial park project
At their Nov. 22, 2022, governance and priorities meeting and then again at their Nov. 29, 2022, regular meeting, county councillors went behind closed doors to discuss “Westlock Industrial Park Middle Access Intersection” and then voted 7-0 to direct CAO Tony Kulbisky to sign the agreement with Alberta Transportation to commit a little over $700,000 in municipal funding to allow the province to tender the $1.4 million project.
According to previous plans, which Kulbisky confirmed will be used for the 2023 project, the northern and southern park exits on the west side of the highway will be closed, while the second entrance will remain open, and new lights will be added. Exit and entrance lanes will also be added, while highway access to the cemetery, as well as many of the east-side exit points, will be shuttered and a service road will be added from the main entrance.
On April 19, Kulbisky said the contract for the work has been awarded, marking flags are up around the industrial park and Township Road 594 and he expects to “see major movement shortly.”
While the estimated project cost in 2021 was $925,000, with the county chipping in $444,000, roughly 48 per cent, via its general operating reserve, Kulbisky said late last year that they’ve agreed to spend up to $716,040, although “if they (Transportation) tender early on they’re fairly certain it will drop to what’s been approved by past councils” and he expects the final figure to come in around $600,000 at the top end. Alberta Transportation has committed $688,526 to the project and Kulbisky said the county’s share is higher due to the installation of the lights and to pay for their portion of the engineering costs.
In the summer of 2018, the province spent $21.5 million repaving 38 kilometres of Highway 44 up to Township Road 594, while work to the stretch in front of the industrial park and throughout the town was shelved — then-county-CAO Leo Ludwig said at the time that design and property acquisition issues for the industrial park stretch were still being worked on.
van Dijken said in a June 15, 2022, interview that when it became evident work on Highway 44 was ending before the industrial park back in 2018, “work started on trying to understand why.”
“To be quite honest the ‘why’ was hinging on the county industrial park and trying to negotiate an agreement with the county on how to properly handle the entrances and the turning lanes and all of that,” van Dijken confirmed in the same June 15 interview. “Last fall we got to the point where Transportation and the county came to an agreement. As soon as we had that I knew that this would eventually go to the next level.”
Past Highway 44 work
In October 2022, the majority of the dilapidated stretch of Highway 44 south from the Highway 18 intersection with the Town of Westlock past the industrial park to just before Township Road 594 received a fresh asphalt overlay as part of “maintenance” work that was intended to tide the road over until a slew of major upgrades slated for 2026.
At the time van Dijken characterized the roughly three kilometres worth of work as “a maintenance job until the design work is done on the reconstruction phase” — throughout the spring and early summer 2022, Emcon Services, which is contracted by the province to maintain area highways, patched numerous potholes on Highway 44 and also performed the recent “maintenance” overlay.
In June 2022, the province committed to a bevy of work to Highways 18 and 44 within the Town of Westlock, including “major upgrades” to the intersection of the two by 2026 as the 2022 Provincial Construction Program includes repaving/reconstruction for Highway 44 (two kilometres south of Highway 18 and five kilometres north of Highway 18) and Highway 18, east and west of Highway 44.
