Winnipeg’s mayor is doubling down on his push to reopen Portage and Main to pedestrians.
Scott Gillingham told Global Winnipeg that the city is losing massive amounts of money each year to maintain the underground concourse, after revealing last week that repairs to the membrane that protects the underground would cost upwards of $73 million and cause five years of disruptive construction.
“Over 40 years, we would lose at least $40-plus million, when it comes to just maintaining the operating expenses of that concourse,” he said. “We’ve got security, repairs, cleaning, utilities… they exceed rental income by an average of just about a million dollars a year.”
Gillingham said the city still plans to speak with businesses in the underground about the proposed decommissioning of the concourse, which would cost millions in its own right and take a few years to complete.
“We’re going to be having conversations with the property owners on the four corners of Portage and Main and also with the business owners as well.
“We do recognize it will have some impact on some of the businesses. The City of Winnipeg owns that concourse. Those six businesses in the concourse would of course be impacted… we’re going to have dialogue with the business owners and the property owners as well.”
Although for many Winnipeggers, Gillingham’s announcement came as a surprise, the mayor said the need to repair the membrane is an issue council has known about for some time.
“We have known this information is coming for years. During my last term of council, I think it was 2017, this dialogue started to happen in earnest. We’ve known that there’d be a cost to repairing the membrane, we knew it would be significant, now we have the specific numbers.
“It’s time to make a practical decision… ultimately to open the intersection to pedestrian traffic.”
The iconic intersection was initially closed to foot traffic in the late 1970s, but the idea of reopening the intersection has been a near-constant topic of conversation in Winnipeg.
Things came to a head when then-mayor Brian Bowman — who had originally campaigned on reopening Portage and Main — issued a plebiscite on the topic as part of the 2018 civic election.
The results of that plebiscite showed an almost 65/35 split among Winnipeggers in favour of keeping the intersection dedicated to vehicular traffic, although later reports indicated that the vast majority of those who voted ‘no’ on re-opening Portage and Main were commuters who didn’t live in the immediate area.
Gillingham, himself a ‘no’ supporter in that plebiscite, repeated Thursday that much more information has become available since 2018 that makes re-opening the intersection the right choice for the city.