In a meeting sometimes marked with testy exchanges, Victoria City Council this morning voted in favour of replacing the Johnson Street Bridge.

Councillor Geoff Young speaks as Council debates the decision to repair or replace the blue bridge. Photo by Robert Randall © VibrantVictoria.ca.

Councillor Geoff Young was the sole dissenting vote in the otherwise unanimous choice to replace the iconic twin-bascule bridge, saying he preferred a “none of the above” option.

Council had earlier been presented with the results of an Ipsos-Reid poll saying the majority of residents and businesses preferred the option of replacing the bridge over fixing the bridge and giving it a deluxe seismic upgrade.

At the conclusion of the meeting of Council’s Governance and Priorities Committee, the decision was made to borrow $49.2 million, which combined with other funding totaling $77 million, is the budgeted amount for the replacement bridge and the associated roadway changes.

Young pointed out that the two options offered in the City’s poll omitted what would have been the ideal solution: fixing the bridge but without the extra $6 million seismic strengthening that would enable the bridge to withstand a statistically rare cataclysmic earthquake. A visibly agitated Mayor Dean Fortin responded by saying that Council had rejected that option long ago. When Young brought up the idea of having the rail bridge serve as a temporary road span during rehabilitation, City Staff called the plan “substandard and unsafe”. Staffers also shot down the plan to do repair work at night, saying it was “not practical” and “not realistic”.

Councillor Pam Madoff defended her heritage track record while explaining the reasoning behind replacement, saying seismic concerns and a desire to preserve key infrastructure outweighed the heritage value of the bridge. Madoff told how visits to post-quake cities in California and Washington demonstrated the unpredictability of earthquakes and the importance of “ensuring and insuring” the integrity of the City’s infrastructure. Madoff also said that an investigation of the maintenance history of the bridge and how it got to its present state would be “useful information.”

On the topic of deferring major repair work for a few years, Councillor Chris Coleman warned this would jeopardize the Federal Government’s $21 million contribution.

In a letter to Mayor and City Councillors this morning, JohnsonStreetBridge.org director Ross Crockford accused the elected officials of failing to ask tough questions of City staff, including why rehab costs have risen dramatically and how they can be so sure the relatively-untested bascule design will be successful.

City Hall will now prepare a borrowing bylaw tomorrow that will be voted on in a citizen referendum planned for November 20, 2010.

Several “sticky” threads dedicated to every aspect of the Johnson Street Bridge issue can be found in VibrantVictoria’s discussion forum’s Infrastructure subforum. General bridge information is discussed here.

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