The Wapiti Bridge along Highway 40 will soon be twinned, but the County of Grande Prairie will be keeping its eye on a potential crossing in the Range Road 90 area in the future (Photo: Shaun Penner / EverythingGP staff)

By Shaun Penner

Secondary Crossing Site

Discussions around crossing over Wapiti River near Range Road 90 not moving forward

May 8, 2021 | 7:00 AM

With other major projects set to get underway this spring, discussions between the County of Grande Prairie and MD of Greenview about a possible secondary crossing site over the Wapiti River have been placed on the backburner.

The idea to explore the possibility of adding a crossing to connect Range Road 90, south of Wembley, to Highway 666 west of Grovedale came from County Council in the summer of 2019. It had wanted to discuss the idea with its neighbours on the other side of the Wapiti.

At Monday’s meeting though, County Council received a report from administration that said that Greenview Council voted to take no action on the idea at a recent meeting.

Reeve Leanne Beaupre says there were likely a number of reasons for the MD to take no action, one of which was the twinning of Highway 40 project getting underway this spring, which will see a second bridge be built along the highway.

The idea for the bridge to the west of Highway 40 was brought forward prior to the agreement to have the highway twinned, and Beaupre says both parties will now wait to see if that will suffice to relieve traffic issues in the area.

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“They’d like to see exactly how much pressure is taken off by that second bridge and twinning,” said Beaupre.

While the second bridge being built adjacent to the current one along the highway does help in the event of a collision on one of the bridges halting traffic, Beaupre says more needs to be done to address the traffic pressures in the City of Grande Prairie along Highway 40 and 43 west.

That is why she says County Council is going to continue to push for the Highway 40X bypass to be approved by the province to connect Highway 43 at Richmond Hill to Highway 40 south of the city.

“We can’t continue to bottleneck traffic in through the city,” said Beaupre. “(We’re) continuing to lobby and pressure the province, and our MLAs, to support the bypass around the City of Grande Prairie.”

“It’s going to be imperative in the future to control a lot of the issues with traffic backlog and things like that, especially for the heavy equipment that is moving around.”

Despite the double bridge along Highway 40, Beaupre still sees plenty of benefits for a bridge to connect the municipalities in the Pipestone area. Namely, for industry.

“There are quite a bit of industry producers that have operations on both sides of the river. So, we thought that, logistically, it would make more sense for them to be able to cross the river versus having to come all the way back towards Grande Prairie to cross the river.”

With that, Beaupre hopes such discussions can come back when the time is right for both municipalities.

“They’ve given us a no thank you, not right now,” said Beaupre. “I don’t think it is necessarily a dead issue.

“I just think that it’s a ‘we’ll see what we need in the future.”