Like a bad dream from which the city can’t seem to wake up, the sad saga of the Somerset Street footbridge over the Rideau Canal goes on and on.
Around this time last year, it appeared that the 25-year-old debate over the bridge had finally been settled when the funding was pushed through city council.
In a budget that included a 3.9-per-cent municipal tax increase, almost $4 million was set aside to build the pedestrian bridge over the Rideau Canal at Somerset Street West, pushing the cost to more than $5 million in total. This despite vociferous opposition from some Centretown residents and councillors that the bridge is unnecessary and a gross waste of money.
Opposition to the bridge centred on a number of valid complaints. For example, the pathway between Somerset Street and the University of Ottawa will only serve a very small community. Even then, the people that need to cross the canal have four other options in the immediate area, including the Laurier Bridge which itself underwent a $21-million renovation the year before.
In order to woo the necessary votes at budget time last year, councillors in favour of the project agreed that the city would seek funding partners to offset the costs of the bridge. In light of this, the funding was approved by the smallest margin possible: 12-10.
Now, it seems, the promise to seek outside funding was a red herring.
The bridge is being built — to be completed by the fall — and paid for entirely by the taxpayers of Ottawa. No outside financiers have been found. The two biggest ostensible beneficiaries of the bridge, the National Capital Commission and the University of Ottawa, have eschewed contributing to its cost.
And why should they? With or without their dollars, the bridge is being built, and will benefit them equally whether they pitch in on the cost or not. This is something that seems to have escaped council when it approved this ridiculous quest.
If councillors were truly intent on getting outside help to fund the bridge, they would have approached the NCC and the U of O before construction with the tactic that the bridge would not be built without their dollars.
Instead, city council put the cart way ahead of the horse. Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes says this was the plan all along, that the bridge was always going to be paid for, and now the city is just seeing if, “by chance,” there is any private funding available.
So either the bridge-friendly councillors fibbed to squeak the funding through the budget, or the city is going about the most nonsensical fundraising drive possible — going about soliciting outside funding for a project which isn’t contingent on outside funding.
The boondoggle that is the Somerset bridge has confirmed city council as a theatre of the absurd, to be remembered, no doubt, come municipal election time in November.
— Laura Drake