What do you know?

Taking a break from the Bad Reason series, I’m going to recount a brief story instead.

This evening I attended a community association meeting hosted by the Rockland Neighbourhood Association. It was a brief re-zoning proposal for additional rental suites in one of the neighborhood’s large old houses, long ago subdivided into apartments.

One of the first people I saw was City Councillor Chris Coleman, who is Rockland’s community liaison. Otherwise, the meeting was sparsely attended by a mere handful of die-hard policy wonks, most of whom I already knew from other meetings. Imagine my surprise when, chatting with three Rockland neighbors afterward, I realized that even these fully committed civic policy mavens knew very little about the City’s plans to replace the Johnson Street Bridge.

They did know that on April 23 City Council voted in principle to go ahead with replacing the Johnson Street Bridge.

They didn’t know:

that Engineering has never said that the bridge was unsafe or in danger of falling down;
that repairs to the bridge do not have to entail seismic upgrading (that is, the two are separate and can be addressed separately);
that the Hon. Bill Bennett, the Province’s Minister for Community and Rural Development, will decide which projects receive Federal infrastructure funding;
that no other municipal application for Federal infrastructure support was as large as ours (and simultaneously hastily conceived, with no design for a finished product to hand);
that there are no immediate plans to secure against earthquake damage the vital infrastructural lifelines (including the water main and utilities – including natural gas lines) that run under the Point Ellice (aka Bay Street Bridge), even though that bridge will surely collapse in a major seismic event, while the Johnson Street Bridge will probably just lock in place.

And that’s just for starters. Here are several otherwise extremely informed civic-minded citizens, and they’re struggling with the facts. The only way they can “explain” to themselves this massive project is by believing that the bridge must be an imminent danger (“unsafe”), although as I’ve pointed out here, the City’s Engineers admitted that’s not the case at all.

So my question to you, dear reader, is: what do you know?

In your mind, how deeply are cycling safety issues (which are very real) and concerns over combining rail, pedestrian, car, and bicycle traffic blending with concerns about structural and seismic safety?

Do you know that the traffic safety and the seismic issues can be separated out, and addressed independently of one another, and that pressing traffic safety issues can be addressed without including a complete seismic retrofit? Or that a seismic retrofit – or outright replacement – of the Point Ellice/ Bay Street Bridge would be a more prudent investment in vital public infrastructure?

When you think about this issue (if at all), are you aware of any details regarding the application, its scope, and how it compares with the applications put in by other municipalities across Canada? And, given the competitive nature of the application and granting process, do you think about what will happen if Federal and Provincial funding isn’t forthcoming? Do you know that the Federal government can ask for its money back, if the ambitious project isn’t completed by March 2011?

What do you know about your rights, as a citizen (and tax-payer), to question the city’s priorities around spending potentially the full amount (so far estimated at $63 million), or do you feel that bridge replacement and the already huge cost associated with it is a question of inevitability, and that it’s best to stand aside and let things take their course?

What’s holding you back from having a say on this issue? Is it what you know, or what you don’t know?