Maley Extension driving towards construction

Decades of arguing over the Maley Drive Extension are giving way to planning and building the $80 million Sudbury ring road, and in the coming weeks, it will bring about a permanent change to the local landscape.

The road begins at College Boreal on the Lasalle Extension and will run to Municipal Road 80, through some dense forests and marshes and blast through some rocky hills to meet up with the existing Maley at Barrydowne Road.

Managing engineer Ted Archuticz, whose company Aecom is being paid $8.5 million to design and manage the project, admits its not the ideal terrain for building a road.

"It looks worse than it is," he says.

City officials should have a better idea in the next few weeks of whether or not the controversial ring road can be built on the funding committed by the municipal, provincial and federal governments.

Right now a contract for realigning Municipal Road 80 and moving the busy four-lane road to the east to make room for Maley is up for bids, with the tender closing July 7.

"You never know how the economy is going to react, what the prices are going to be like," says Archuticz. "So, yes, everyone is anxious what the prices are going to come in at on this first contract."

He says if the bids come in higher than expected, work on the existing section of Maley between Barrydowne Road and Falconbridge Road may be delayed or scaled back.

That realignment work is expected to get underway in August and take about a year. A second contract for clearing the land is expected to be issued later this summer, with the work beginning in the fall.

The main road construction contract is also expected to be tendered this fall, with work starting as early as this winter, getting ready for the opening of the extension in 2019.

"Finally a strategically important project like this is coming to fruitition. It's exciting." says Archuticz.

Some people in New Sudbury are less excited, worried about the bush that for decades has been an unofficial wilderness park for the neighbourhood.

"I mean, progress is progress, but you got to replace some of the greenspace we've had taken away from us," says Richard Munavish, who has lived in the area for 20 years.

Maley will be a divided highway, that will also divide the vast bushland that runs from Lasalle Boulveard all the way to the Valley.

But plans do call for a tunnel under the road that will keep the trail network connected.