Two new sites on shortlist for bridge
Jake Rupert, The Ottawa Citizen - Wednesday, October 24, 2007
NCC move angers Ottawa councillors, who want list cut
A National Capital Commission-led study of potential new interprovincial Ottawa River crossings has added two new corridors to the eight already being considered.
The move has angered Ottawa councillors who, earlier this year, told a team studying the issue that they would like to see the list shortened, not expanded.
The team leading the project has added a new potential route on the western edge of the Quebec side of the national capital area and one at Lower Duck Island on the eastern side of the urban area.
Project leader Steve Taylor, of Roche NCE consultants, said the new corridors were added after the first round of public consultations with residents and officials on both sides of the river. He said there is a “valid rationale” for each of them, and they will be included in the next phase of the study.
“No decisions have been made, and we’ll be treating each corridor equally as the process continues,” he said.
He said the addition of the two new sites will not throw the study off schedule.
Shortlisted interprovincial crossings
Photograph by : Dennis Leung, The Ottawa Citizen
Ottawa councilors, who have already voted on the crossing they prefer, reacted angrily to the news.
In June, council voted to tell the commission to drop three potential western locations from the study.
That was because the need for a bridge in the east end is greater.
Councillors also decided they preferred an east-end crossing point at Kettle Island near the Aviation Parkway. These ideas were forwarded to the study team.
Yesterday, Bay Councillor Alex Cullen, whose ward contains two potential west-side crossing points, was furious that the sites are still being considered because both would require major roads through city-owned Andrew Haydon Park and would cross the river at a widening called Lac Des-chênes. “The idea of crossing Lac Des-chênes is so obviously a non-starter, one has to wonder why it is still in the study,” he said. “It would be enormously expensive, blight a beautiful lake, (and) destroy an important community park.”
Ruth Tremblay, president of the Crystal Beach-Lakeview Community Association, whose area would be affected by the crossings, said she finds it hard to believe the sites are still being considered.
“Many of us in our community voiced our opposition to this hare-brained proposal to destroy Andrew Haydon Park,” she said. “Don’t the NCC consultants get the message?”
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, councillors aren’t happy with the inclusion of a possible crossing at Lower Duck Island. “We sent them messages that we wanted the crossing to be at Kettle Island, and that we wanted them to eliminate the number of areas they were looking at,” said Innes Councillor Rainer Bloess. “Instead, they added more and this has the potential of complicating matters unnecessarily and making the study really inefficient.”
Despite the criticisms, the team will now look at a host of impacts the development of each of the 10 corridors could cause. These range from effects on aquatic life to noise and traffic in the proposed areas.
Once this is done, the results will be made public, and another round of public consultations will take place. After that, the team will narrow the list to two options, one in the east and one in the west, and present the federal and two provincial governments with budgets for the projects.
The current timetable for the project would see decisions made in 2009 on whether to fund the crossings.
The $4.5-million study aims to find common agreement on where the crossings should be, what form to take—bridges, tunnels or ferries—and how much they would cost.
The process is designed to get the five governments—Ottawa, Gatineau, Quebec, Ontario and Canada—to agree on a priority list of preferred options for future crossings.
After this, it will be up to the governments to figure out how many new crossings will be built and how they will be paid for. Having the five governments agree on the preferred options will be key to getting anything done because two previous attempts to get a new crossing, in 1994 and 1999, collapsed when no agreement could be reached.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
Print this page - Email this page