Winnipeg pilot project intended to ease back lane drainage woes fails to deliver any results: report

Areport to the City of Winnipeg's water and waste committee says apilot project that builta back lane intended to reduce drainage into the city's sewage system has failed to confirm the design works or provide any usable data.

The $328,000 the city spent on the project 40 per cent higher than the cost of a standard back lane renewal appears to have returned little value for the money, according to the report.

"Anything that could have gone wrong did go wrong not even done wrong, done badly," said St. Vital Coun. Brian Mayes, who was on the mayor'senvironmental advisory committee when the contract for construction of the lane was green-lit in 2014.

The "green back lane" was constructed in 2015 in a lanebounded by Wentworth Street, Stafford Street, Dorchester Avenue and Grosvenor Avenue.

Instead of a standard poured concrete back lane, theproject involved installing permeable paving stones in the centre of the lane over top crushed rock.

Water would "infiltrate in the centre of the lane and be collected by the subdrain system, reducing or delaying flows to the combined sewer system," according to the report, which is set to be presented to the water and waste committee at its Thursday meeting.

"While the lane has performed reasonably well in the short term some settlement has occurred and the lane has not been maintained in accordance with the design recommendations," the report says.

It also notes other issues, including the fact the original planned location for the green lane was changed to the existing location,without doing pre-construction monitoring.

That meant the stated purpose of the pilot project to measure the effectiveness of the design wasn't accomplished.

"The effectiveness of the land drainage flow reduction or delay could not be evaluated because the location of the pilot needed to be changed due to poor sub-surface soil conditions," the report says.

"Preconstruction flow monitoring data was not available for the new lane location."

As a 1st step, pilot 'pretty alarming': Mayes

As well, an important construction material wasn't added between the paving stonesand a necessary layer of fabric under the roadbed wasn't installed, the report says.

Mayes, who has fought for funding to replace multiple gravel back lanes in his ward, isn'timpressed.

"Years later to see that it wasn't put in correctly, it wasn't maintained correctly and there's no way of knowing what what the results were yeah, that's disappointing," Mayes told CBC News.

Water and waste committee chair Coun. Cindy Gilroy(Daniel McIntyre) was reluctant to condemn the misstepsoutlined in the report on the back lane project, but did vow to ask some questions at Thursday's meeting.

"I do have questions. Is something working in other cities? Is it something that could work here? Is our soil conditions not conducive to that?" Gilroytold CBC News.

Mayes was more aggressive in his comments, raising concerns about potentially moreexpensivegreen infrastructure upgrades forWinnipeg's sewer system, given the issues that arose with theinstallation of a single block of green back lane.

"We better have council involved and the public involved if we are going to do$100 million worth ofgreen infrastructure, because if this is our first step, that's pretty alarming," Mayes said.

Water and waste staff lists a series of "lessons learned," from the failed back lane project in their report.

Those include tendering any future green back lane projects with other lane renewals to get a better price, conducting more thorough geo-technicalinvestigationsprior to construction, and establishing better communications with city staff on various aspects of the project.