The Town of Okotoks is expecting to wrap up construction on Veterans Way for the winter and will start again in the spring.
The last step will be to install guardrails on either side of the street and then work will cease until the spring.
Okotoks engineering manager Marley Oness said Veterans Way will stay as-is until the spring when more work can be done to pour the concrete for the sidewalks on both sides of the street.
“(The sidewalk on the) east side will be closed and the west side will be open,” Oness said.
The roadway re-opened to traffic in October, but work to pave the sidewalks has been ongoing and is not complete.
The $1.6 million first phase of the Veteran’s Way reconstruction, including a wider, multi-purpose sidewalk, artwork and traffic calming measures, is supposed to be completed by the end of 2017.
The sidewalk work is being done to improve pedestrian usability. Veterans Way has twice as much use as any other north-south corridor to access the downtown.
The entire project to upgrade Veterans Way will cost $3 million and will be done in three phases.
One Elma Street resident who lives three houses down from Veterans Way said it is disappointing the east sidewalk will not be open for the winter.
Ronald Brooks said he has lived on Elma Street for more than two decades and said Veterans Way, formerly known as Centre Avenue, is regularly under construction.
“I’ve been in the same house on the same street for 25 years and a third of that time that road has been under construction,” Brooks said.
His understanding is Veterans Way will have to be repaved again next summer, again causing a disruption for local residents and others who use the busy street.
“We have lived in a construction zone this summer and now we will have to do it again,” he said.
Brooks added he is also still waiting to hear if upgrades to Cenotaph Park will proceed.
The plans to landscape the park were scrapped when Town council voted to do away with a plan to re-align Elma Street where it crosses Veterans Way.
Brooks said the Town has indicated they will be carrying out more consultation over improvements to the park, which he wants to see go forward.
“The trees that are there have been there since the 1950s,” he said. “They are disgusting. You need to walk around this park and ask yourself, would you be happy if this was your backyard?”
