Local resident voices concerns over bridge safety

City Council heard from a resident Monday frustrated with the slow response by the City with reconstruction of a bridge at the end of Olive Street.

Bob Stevens, who lives near Olive Street, uses the bridge to access Thompson Park and the Kate Pace Way, as well as to get to the YMCA and the Gardens, says that council has been avoiding the bridge's replacement and is neglectful of safety issues regarding the condemned structure.

The arched, wooden structure, approximately 12 feet wide, spans a thirty or forty foot width of Chippewa Creek and stands directly behind the YMCA.

The bridge connects to the Kate Pace Way and acts as a connector between parking areas for the Memorial Gardens area, as well as an entry point to the baseball diamonds and park facilities behind the arena.

Although it has been officially declared condemned for over 2 years, it has yet to be dealt with as City Hall has justified the slow pace with the necessity that an environmental impact study be done before any work could begin.

Stevens, as well as many local frustrated residents in the area, find this hard to believe as when the bridge heaved with the frost two winters ago, a study could have been initiated instead of the simple nailing of boards waist high across the bridge’s entrance.

Ironically, the closing off of the bridge this way created a perfect ladder that numerous residents, including children, were using to cross the waterway, especially during slippery and icy conditions, creating a dangerous situation with slip and falls over a waterway that could be deadly.

“The only thing that council has done is put up a death trap,” Stevens says, adding “who would be responsible for that?”

Obviously, any resident with any simple building knowledge would know that ten minutes with one of the City’s backhoes could easily remove the bridge and allow for the rebuilding of its replacement on the cement pad already located on the banks of the creek.

Even to price out the cost of doing a pressure treated six by six flat timber bridge would not be excessively costly to the ratepayers however, the city is countering that while the project has not been returned from study, they know or are assuming an astonishing sum of $85,000 replacement cost per bridge.

And with the city planning on replacing three of the four currently standing, the costs of maintaining the foot path infrastructure is beyond what they can afford in their budget, perhaps a short sighted replacement investment could also be the culprit, preventing the repairs.

The local presenter pointed out that it’s odd that the City has so much funding for the Memorial Gardens upgrades yet can’t even fix the foot bridges leading to the facility, left for years on end.

“What’s the point of fixing it up (the Gardens) if your cutting off the road to get to it?” asks Stevens.

Interestingly, the City finalized its 2013 operating budget at this same meeting, with Mayor McDonald assuring Stevens that the bridge designs were just about done and that the city hopes to have them in place by this summer.