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Commission to hear from city before weighing in on study supporting Kettle Island route
The board of the National Capital Commission yesterday decided to delay its endorsement of a new bridge route across the Ottawa River until the City of Ottawa has come out with a clear position on the issue.
NCC chairman Russell Mills said that in the spirit of the commission’s new era of openness and consultation, he was advising the board to delay a decision on Phase 1 of a major bridge study until after city council has taken a clear position. Mr. Mills said it was unfortunate and frustrating, given the careful timetable set out by the commission for the project, but that it was better to delay the decision and hear the city clearly.
The board of the commission agreed with Mr. Mills and also urged city councillors to take a day to do a tour of the possible bridge sites in the eastern part of the capital region, something NCC board members did on Wednesday with the consultant who is studying the project.
The location of a new bridge linking Gatineau with Ottawa has become hugely contentious in Ottawa because the preferred route selected by the consultants, Kettle Island, will have a big effect on neighbourhoods such as Manor Park and Rockcliffe. Two Ottawa councillors grilled the consultants on the project for the better part of a day at a transportation committee meeting recently. Full city council then voted to tell the NCC to add two other possible routes farther east for the next, in-depth stage of the multi-year environmental assessment study. But council also voted to discuss reconsideration of the issue at its meeting next Wednesday.
Mr. Mills said the NCC is not bound by any decision or process of either government, but that it has made a promise to listen that should be followed.
“We simply don’t have the views of Ottawa city council,” said Mr. Mills. “We have a national mandate, but we need the local input.”
Mr. Mills said he hopes the city’s position will become clear in the next little while and that the NCC will call a meeting of its board, perhaps around mid-February, to have the debate and make a choice.
But Ottawa Councillor Rainer Bloess, who attended the NCC board meeting and supports the Kettle Island bridge, said council’s deliberations could still take weeks, partly because some councillors who are keenly interested in the issue will be away next week.
Gatineau council has endorsed the Kettle Island route.
The NCC’s board received a detailed briefing on the study yesterday, while some opponents of the proposed routes sat in the audience and rolled their eyes.
Steve Taylor, of Roche-NCE consultants, told the board that the decision-making process had been “systematic and methodical,” though he conceded there are weaknesses in the Kettle Island route, including a poor performance for enhancing public transit and a significant intrusion into existing residential neighbourhoods.
One of the major purposes of a new bridge between Ontario and Quebec is to take many of the 3,500 trucks that rumble over the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge each day out of downtown. But the consultants say only 40 per cent of that bridge’s traffic will end up on the new bridge.
Still, Mr. Taylor said that the dozen corridors were evaluated based on objective criteria, and he warned the board that wading into such a process and picking a different route could lead to court challenges that stop the project entirely.
Ottawa-Vanier MP Mauril Bélanger, who attended the NCC meeting, said he simply wants the NCC and its consultants to study other routes a bit farther east that won’t have the same negative impact on existing neighbourhoods. Mr. Bélanger said he isn’t against a new bridge, but that picking one route at Kettle Island will simply box in the federal, Ontario and Quebec governments when the two other routes just a bit farther east are better truck routes and would do more for the economic development of the region.
Mr. Taylor told the NCC’s board that the road approaches to the bridge would be more of a parkway style corridor, rather than a freeway corridor, and that the bridge would be a landmark in the capital and would increase traffic to the nearby Canada Aviation Museum.
NCC chief executive officer Marie Lemay told reporters that the bridge project has been contentious since the 1980s for good reason, because each possible route has impacts.
“There’s no perfect corridor,” said Ms. Lemay.
But she said that the current study has been comprehensive and moved the issue forward. She said the next phase of the environmental assessment will cost $3 million if one corridor is selected, but if Kettle Island plus two other corridors farther east are all studied, the cost would be about $8 million.
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