CARSTAIRS – Construction on the new Rocky Mountain Motorsports Park east of Carstairs could get underway as early as April, says Dominic Young, president of the company building the multi-million dollar facility.
Rocky Mountain Motorsports plans to construct a 3.5-kilometre recreation and training racetrack at the intersection of Highway 2 and Highway 581 on a 385.64-acre parcel.
Mountain View County has already approved a development permit for the facility, including the motorsports racetrack, administrative trailer, medical trailer, washroom trailer, race control trailer, staging and view areas, a helicopter pad, berm, fencing, and parking facilities, he said.
“We are fully expecting as soon as weather really allows us to start moving significant amounts of dirt we will mobilize and hopefully begin construction in April,” said Young.
Asked when officials expect to see vehicles using the facility, he said, “It will be late summer or early fall time frame for any operations. Obviously this is going to be built out over a period of time.
“What we are targeting is initially we will be constructing the infrastructure, the county range roads and that kind of thing and the storm ponds that will service the entire site and the berms for sound mitigation.”
“We're thinking it doesn’t make sense to mobilize unless we can start to get a significant amount of work done. It’s expensive to move all the equipment into place, so we will wait to go full-bore, which is to say we hope for an early spring.”
Constructing the track will be the “primary focus for 2020,” he said.
Other construction will take place in 2021, he said.
The project will require a realignment of Rge. Rd. 10A and a rebuild of a half mile of Rge. Rd. 10.
“Alberta Transportation has approved the intersection for Highway 581 (at the site),” he said.
The county has also approved the re-designation of the property from agriculture to direct control and from low density residential to business park.
The development permit approval issued in May 2019 comes with a number of conditions, including that the applicant shall provide the county with a noise generation report once a month, no drag strips or drag racing shall be permitted on the site at any time, and the applicant will be responsible for all costs associated with a county approved sound consultant for the purpose of undertaking annual verification of calibration of equipment required for the purpose of monitoring noise on-site.
Memberships are already being sold, he said.
“Our target is 300 members,” he said. “I’ve got approximately 190 people who have said they’d like a membership.”
