By John Francis
The Heron Point bridge has been straddling the Stokes River since 1952. But recently, it has been doing so with steadily diminishing authority. Its underpinnings are not as firmly pinned as one would like…
As far back as 2010, the bridge’s load limit had been reduced to 12 tons, which caused the private waste removal company to refuse to service the Heron Point campground.
Which in turn required the campground’s owner to deliver the garbage himself to the Lindsay Landfill, thereby crossing an even more decrepit bridge across Spring Creek — a bridge that dates to 1925. A bridge that was built and paid for by the Province of Ontario…
But I digress.
Bridge replacements are extremely expensive and MNBP’s (Municipality of Northern Bruce Peninsula) available funds are barely enough to keep the lights on as it is. It used to be that federal and provincial governments could be counted on to help with bridges and other big-ticket items but those days are long gone. Replacing all of our decrepit bridges would involve quite a tax increase, so Council has been in no hurry to engage with the problem.
But engineers’ reports kept coming back with increasingly dire projections for Heron Point Bridge. Council included it in their Annual Road Tour almost every year since 2015.
There seemed to be two alternatives and it was hard to tell which was worse. One involved building a temporary bridge for Heron Point residents to use while the new bridge was being built. The price of building or renting a temporary bridge was breathtaking. The other alternative involved moving everybody out of Heron Point while the bridge was built, and paying to accommodate them elsewhere.
Around 2016, someone noticed that it would be possible to create an alternative access to Heron Point. You could buy a piece of property between the village and Heron Point and build a relatively short bit of road entirely on the south side of the river. This would bypass the bridge entirely. You could leave the bridge in place for pedestrians and cyclists, but the main access would be via the new road.
It would be somewhat more expensive than a bridge replacement but would have a couple of benefits that increased its appeal: you wouldn’t need to replace it every 75 years and once the road was in place, you could subdivide the land it ran through and sell accessible lots on both sides of the road.
This was (in my opinion) a truly brilliant, outside-the-box idea.
But at Council’s December 9 Meeting, reality reared its ugly head.
While MNBP was getting its ducks in a row — purchasing the land, doing the necessary Environmental Assessments and so forth — the province changed the rules, adding a requirement for an extra five years of environmental monitoring and mitigation. WSP, the engineering firm hired by the municipality for this project, estimates that the five years of monitoring would cost half a million dollars but they emphasize that this is just a guess. If extensive mitigation is required, the cost could be substantially higher.
We could end up spending more in environmental mitigation than the entire cost of replacing the existing bridge — including the cost of paying everybody to go live somewhere else for a while.
It’s not that replacing the bridge got cheaper — it didn’t. In fact it got a lot more expensive, just like everything else. It’s just that the environmental mitigation cost for the new road could end up costing as much as the road itself.
The municipality went into this thinking that building a new road would cost us a bit more but we’d easily make that much back when we subdivided the land on both sides of the newly created road.
In fact it still might be worthwhile to do it that way but it’s a judgement call now rather than a slam-dunk.
But this outcome should not be allowed to throw shade on MNBP staff. They came up with a really clever idea and deserve our thanks. In particular, they deserve our encouragement to keep thinking outside the box.
However it’s sure going to make it awkward to plan any kind of new roads for the foreseeable future.
You can see WSP’s report on the Heron Point Bridge in the Agenda for MNBP’s December 9 Meeting.
