Hello fellow Montgomery residents- several of you have emailed or phoned me recently wondering what is happening along Dundonald Avenue. The work is part of the underground servicing that is necessary for the new Bus Barns and the new City Yards. Hamm Construction is installing a water main for this project. Thanks for your patience as this work proceeds.
Just a bit of background on this project- as many of you may know, Saskatoon Transit will be relocating out of the Caswell Hill neighbourhood where residents have complained for years about diesel fumes. The new Bus Barns will have room for all the buses to be stored inside so there will be no need to keep them running outside in the cold winter weather. This will be a significant improvement. The engineers assure me there will be no diesel fumes coming from the new Bus Barns.
The city is also planning to re-locate the City Yards out of downtown warehouse area(the place where all the civic equipment, like graders and front-end loaders are stored). Eventually, they will be moved to an area south of Montgomery along Valley Road. Since all the equipment will be using Valley Road and the new bridge to move around the city, there should be no increase in traffic in our neighbourhood.
Some people have also asked me about the berm on the north side of the CN tracks(the wall of dirt that is designed to stop any noise from the bus barns, the city yards and the new snow dump site). Construction on it was supposed to start in July, but it was decided to do the water main work first. That berm for sound attenuation will eventually be built, likely within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I am lobbying to have it built as high as possible, and if necessary, to have a sound wall built on top of the berm. That should help muffle some of the noise from the dramatically-changed CN train operations. The berm, as currently designed, will vary in height from about two meters to three meters – enough to make sure the new city yards and bus barns aren’t a noise problem, but perhaps not enough to muffle the noise from those constant trains. I am hoping that we can deal with that issue by “tweaking” the design of the berm and putting a sound wall on top of it.
I hope this email answers your questions. If there’s anything you’re still wondering about, please feel free to email me, or, better yet, use that old-fashioned technology called the telephone and phone me at either 306-384-1338 or 306-227-1411.
Pat Lorje
Councillor
Ward Two
306-227-1411