Planned work on a segment of a major infrastructure project in downtown Timmins appears to have been shelved.

At a council meeting on March 9, Timmins Chief Administrative Officer Dave Landers recommended work on Section 5 of the Connecting Link project be postponed beyond this construction season. City engineers estimated the section of the roadwork project, which runs along Algonquin Boulevard from Mattagami Boulevard South just east of the bridge to Theriault Boulevard, would cost $6.1 million. The city received just one bid for the project—at nearly $8.5 million.

The work was planned to begin this spring.

In lieu of the work on the Connecting Link, Landers recommended the city spend the allocated funds to perform work elsewhere, such as on detour roads.

That approach fits well with priorities laid out by Mayor George Pirie in his state of the city address earlier this year. In it, he indicated that the city should focus on creating a bypass route around the city in view of the projected impact of the downtown construction.

“This will affect not only every business on Algonquin but every business east and west of the bridge,” he said in his address. “It will affect our citizens on the proposed by-pass routes. It will affect our major industrial players who truck their feed to our mills. It will be extremely deleterious to the roads designated as by-pass routes, which quite frankly, need repairs now.”

The challenge for Timmins is that the complete Connecting Link project spans more than 21 kilometres along Highway 101 from Kamiskotia Road in the west to Porcupine. The original cost of the project was estimated at more than $100 million. Since 2016, about five kilomeres of the project—worth about $19 million—of the project has been completed.

In the midst of this, the Ministry of Transportation will not allow the city to take on multi-year infrastructure projects. That's something Landers wants to fix.

"Perhaps if we’re able to put out a multi-year project we might be able to either create a larger project itself of split the work over a couple of construction seasons, which might be more attractive for contractors and provide some more competition into the market because they’d be able to plan a couple years of activity in advance,” he said.

The city applied for a $3-million grant from the province to help fund its Connecting Link construction costs, but has yet to hear back.