Petition goes out for new Hwy 3 access to Grassy Lake

Sunny South News Image Supplied.

By Cal Braid and
Trevor Busch
Southern Alberta Newspapers
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The Highway 3 twinning project is active and rolling along east towards Burdett, its expected endpoint by the end of 2025. It’s a relatively straight stretch from Taber to there, including the quick run through Grassy Lake, where the speed limit drops as the highway threads between the village and the railway. But a year from now, that road will no longer be Hwy 3 proper, but instead a road that serves as access to the businesses and grain elevators. By then, Hwy 3 proper will bypass the village, looping south around it.

 Local retiree David Woodruff drives a school bus in the mornings and afternoons, and the highway construction will drastically alter the landscape that he’s lived on for many years. Knowing the traffic patterns of the trucks and trains that travel through the area, he foresees a couple of problems arising from the current design. He has drafted a petition and is collecting names in hopes of convincing the Province to build an intersection at Range Road 13-2 just east of the Viterra elevator on Hwy 3.

 Woodruff would like the Ministry of Transportation to add a few key features to the construction around the village. He wants to see the intersection at RR 13-2 built with an incoming (east to west) exit lane paved in. The intersection would be slightly west of 13-2 with a connecting road built on each side. At 13-5, near where he lives, he’s asking for an entrance/merge lane. In the area, a feedlot, a handful of farms, three oil batteries, and a gravel pit all generate traffic.

 “The hot mix plant is out there. So, there’s scads of traffic coming in there, and a lot of this is truck traffic,” he said. “So they run them up over the rail track, and you have to stop at the four lane and then make a hard right turn, and it’s more than a 90 degree angle, and so they’re getting up to speed. They’re doing seven miles an hour, and somebody doing 87 comes along and hits them from the back. Well, I say leave that part of number three.” He figures that very little construction would be needed for those exit and entrance lanes.

 Woodruff pointed out that there’s a trade-off for a free flowing highway bypass rather than just widening it to four lanes straight through the village. “I mean, you’ve got a four lane going through your town. Nobody wants to slow down to 40 or 50 or 60 like in Taber, or Coaldale, right? Right now, the businesses in Grassy – it’s going to trash them – just like it did in Barnwell. At the store there, he says 80 per cent of his business is people coming in off the highway, and I mean, he’s just bought the thing. So, I feel terrible for him, but there is something that I think can be done to help. It’s not going to alleviate the situation, but something that will help is to have an easier access from the east, and an easier access back onto the highway at the West.”

Taber-Warner MLA Grant Hunter is in the loop, so to speak, and said he has heard from constituents about the bypass issues.

 “We’re trying to work through them with the department. Basically, what’s happened is we had a whole lot of consultation over many years. And then you put together functional plans and functional studies and then you start putting shovels in the dirt. At that point, when you try to go and do a change order, it can be very expensive. And so what we have to figure out is, is there a way of being able to address the concerns of the residents and business owners in Grassy Lake without costing us millions of dollars? Because, again, when you make those change orders, that’s what they do, because it costs a lot.”

 He said they’re looking at the numbers to determine what’s feasible. 

“If the change orders of that project go above $5 million we have to go back to the treasury board and get permission, which it’s almost impossible to get. So we are just trying to figure out what that quantum is going to be and the ministry is working through this, trying to figure out if we can come up with a solution that will work.”

 “We’re trying to work through it. I’ve said straight out to the individuals that I make no promises, but we will do the best we can to try to make sure that it’s as functional as possible for all parties,” he said. One concern that he validated was that of the Super-B trucks, past the school and the village, and if there was a way of stopping that and having them coming from the west and from the east.

“They’re more concerned about having a good egress on the west side. And just so you know, we do have three egress going in. There’s some from the south and from the east and from the west, but they’re not happy with what’s going on on the west side, that egress, and they’re not happy on the east side as well. So we’re just trying to be able to work through some of those things and see where it goes.”

 As for one of the next phases of the twinning, running along the Whitla-Seven Persons-Medicine Hat stretch, Hunter said he has spoken with the minister about that section to make sure that it’s going to work.

 “This is the right time to be able to have those conversations. Because as we kind of move to the next steps of starting to build out those sections, we need to make sure that everybody’s engaged. So that one is going to be a little trickier. This was the easiest one out of that whole Highway 3 that we’re doing, but that one will be a little bit tougher, for sure, but I think we can get it figured out. But this is the right time for them to start asking those questions. I always thought that once we actually got the money, then all the problems would go away. But that’s not true. Now that (it’s) started – everybody wants to have their part, and then they start fights with each other and say, no, this is where it should be. So you’re not going to make everybody happy, but we try to make as many people happy as possible. That’s our goal.”

 For locals in the Grassy Lake area, Woodruff has left copies of his petition at Chamberlain School, Top Wand Car Wash, First Student bus barn, GL Tires, Mamma’s Kitchen Store and Taber & Grassy Lake Store.