Who pays for paving streets? The answer’s fairly easy on one level. It’s us, the taxpayers, of course.
But not everybody pays the same and sometimes people get a nasty shock.
One resident of a corner lot got floored recently with a huge tax bill, thanks to a paving charge that was much more than he had expected.
The reason? The street he lives on is zoned commercial, and commercial properties pay more than residential.
“The improvement levy (in other words the charge for having your street paved) is based on zoning,” says Laurie Skrynyk, the Town’s Planning and Development Officer. “If it’s zoned commercial there’s a 100 per cent charge on frontage and flankage (in the case of corner lots). Residential is 100 per cent frontage and 25 per cent flankage.”
That 100 per cent does not refer to the total cost of the road rehabilitation job, but more like a third of it. A third comes from the provincial government in the form of grants and another third comes from the $15 a month road infrastructure fund charge on residents’ utility bills. As to why some residential streets are zoned commercial – that goes back to a decision made by a council in the 1980s. Anticipating the growth of the downtown business area, the council of the day broadened the downtown commercial zone by a couple of blocks east and west. Now that it looks as if commercial growth is not likely to happen downtown, a change back to residential zoning for those off-Main streets is under consideration. In fact council already re-zoned a block on 4th St. N.W. just a few months ago, and is talking about doing the same thing for a portion of 3rd St. N.E.
As for the other streets in question, “At this point administration is looking at the situation and then taking it to council,” says acting town manager Greg Gramiak.
There won’t be any streets up for rehab this year. The road rehab program kicks in every second or third year, depending on the shape of the rehab fund – that’s the one the $15 per month goes into.
According to Skrynyk the program starts with an annual assessment of all Slave Lake streets. The operations director ranks them on a scale of one to six – with the ‘ones’ being the highest priority.
“At the same time we do an inspection of the sanitary sewer lines,” says Skrynyk, but not the water lines. Water line probes are prohibitively expensive. What the Town will do instead is review the history of waterline breaks and based on that, decide whether or not any street’s rehab program should include replacement.
Next up is a visit by an engineer to confirm the local assessment.
Based on all those considerations, the operations department prepares a road program for council to consider, in the form of a by-law.
After giving the by-law first reading, the Town holds a public information session, where each affected landowner can get an explanation of the project.
After that, the Town will send a notice to affected landowners of what they’re being charged, and advising them of their right to appeal. Paving projects in the northeast part of town were petitioned down more than once. Unfortunately, residents’ reluctance to pay their portion of paving led to further deterioration of the surface and higher costs later on, Skrynyk says.
So that’s how the program works. Construction costs are going up and it’s even getting hard to find contractors who will do smallish jobs like paving a few blocks, says operations director Roger Borchert. But in recent years that’s all the Town has been able to afford.
Luckily, support for infrastructure is in the agenda of both the provincial and federal governments. Slave Lake has qualified for $6 million more in infrastructure money over the next five years. At $1.2 million per year, it might just allow the Town to catch up to the deterioration of its streets, says Borchert.
The operations director says this spring has been the hardest he’s seen on roads and not just gravel ones. Excessive moisture in the roadbed has caused all sorts of problems on streets around town as the frost comes out. Some of those problems are on the record with provincial infrastructure minister Lyle Oberg, following a brief visit to town last week.
“We had a half hour of his time,” says Gramiak. “We had a really good tour – talked about the challenges.”
The Town is expecting some infrastructure money from the federal government, as well as from a gas tax rebate – but neither is yet confirmed.

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