KERROBERT — It has been an awfully long time coming, but Highway 51 from Kerrobert west to the Alberta border has been completed. Over the decades, many patch jobs and resurfacing have been done but failed quickly. This time around, the base of the road was dug up and redone, so now the highway should last for many years to come.
This highway is particularly important to the business sector of Kerrobert and other communities along that route such as Major and Compeer. So many people have avoided that highway over the years simply because of the poor condition it was in and continued to get worse and even dangerous to travel on. Anyone travelling to Stettler, Red Deer or Sylvan Lake, Alta. now have a brand-new highway to travel on.
I know Kerrobert will welcome the additional traffic coming through town and hopefully the people coming through will stop at our businesses and restaurants.
With the completion of Phase 1 of our street project, we have many questions as to why some neighbouring communities are doing similar projects for less money. I want to address this because even though it may seem like the projects are the same, the scope of the work and route to find money to even consider these projects is not always the same.
One example to compare Kerrobert with is Macklin. I will talk about this because Macklin gets brought up the most by our residents. The first thing is that Macklin started their project a few years before we did. The costs year-over-year increase substantially for the labour, gravel and asphalt. Even if we had started at the same time, we received a $4.5 million grant between the federal and provincial governments. Macklin received $8 million.
Macklin was able to secure gravel for a set cost for the duration of their entire project which we could not. The town of Macklin can also do much of the digging themselves as they have the equipment and personnel to do that type of work. Kerrobert would need to rent or buy such equipment and we do not have anyone trained to use that type of equipment.
There will always be differences in how each community can raise money and save money when doing these types of projects.
The town of Kerrobert had a special visitor Nov. 12. The Kerrobert sports auction was put on between the Kerrobert Tiger senior hockey club and Kerrobert Minor Hockey. The guest speaker was Bryan Trottier who played for 18 seasons in the NHL.
Bryan played most of his career with the New York Islanders, where he helped his team win four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983. After 15 seasons in New York, Bryan then signed with the Pittsburg Penguins, helping Pittsburg win two straight Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992.
After his playing career, Bryan became an assistant coach and received a seventh Stanley Cup ring while helping coach the Colorado Avalanche.
Bryan spoke about his playing days from even before he played in the NHL. He almost quit playing hockey all together while in juniors, but with encouragement from his family and NHL legend Dave “Tiger” Williams, he decided to continue playing and it is a great thing that he did. He went on to have an incredible career.
I must share one story about his visit and that evening that I will never forget. Bryan had a signed jersey that was up for auction. Local young resident Quentin Murphy had the highest bid of $2,000. Later in the evening Quentin found out that a young resident in Kerrobert, Grayson Nunweiller, was going to have to go through some more treatments for cancer. Quentin decided to donate his jersey back in order to raise money for Grayson. The jersey would then be displayed at our arena. The bids were up to an additional $3,000 when Bryan Trottier, visibly moved by the gesture, brought up another jersey so that one jersey could be displayed at our arena and the winning bidder would have a jersey to keep. The winning bid was $4,000 by another local guy Luke Alberts, who then donated his jersey to Grayson.
Everyone was moved by the incredible gestures of these young guys, and it just made me so proud of the fact our future is in great hands when we have our younger generations looking out for each other like this. Very well done.
