Red Hill parkway judicial inquiry now expected to cost up to $20 million

The cost of a judicial inquiry involving Hamilton’s Red Hill Valley Parkway continues to rise.

The city has now spent $11.1 million in related costs, after council voted in March 2019 to ask a Superior Court judge to investigate how a report that raised questions about the parkway’s safety was hidden from public view for five years.

Virtual hearings are now expected to begin in the spring of 2022. By the time the probe is completed, a report presented by legal staff to city politicians on Wednesday projects that the final cost to taxpayers could approach $20 million.

So far, the city has used reserve funds to cover its costs.

The judicial inquiry was initially expected to start as early as fall 2020, but hearings have been delayed in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The search for documents that date back more than a decade has also been cited as a challenge by city lawyers, who have said it has slowed the collection of evidence.

Questions that were raised about the safety of the parkway’s surface also prompted an emergency repaving in the spring of 2019, at a cost of $8.5 million.

The costs of the inquiry to date include fees incurred by Justice Herman J. Wilton-Siegel, who was appointed to preside over the inquiry, as well as the city’s external legal fees.

Ward 14 Coun. Terry Whitehead says the judicial inquiry will be money well spent, because “the Red Hill file is tantamount in representing a crossroads in trust with this community, in the context of people that died on that expressway and what people council knew or what they didn’t know.”

Glanbrook Coun. Brenda Johnson continues to wish they’d voted to proceed with a cheaper auditor general’s report, “I can’t tell you how many rec centres we’ll have to pass over for the money we’re blowing on this.”