Hamilton legal staff are still predicting the final cost of the Red Hill Valley Parkway (RHVP) judicial inquiry at between $18 million and 20 million.
City lawyer Eli Lederman, in an update to the city’s general issues committee on Wednesday, said the cost to date has climbed to $13.2 million, with virtual public hearings scheduled to begin on April 25.
The inquiry will examine questions about parkway safety and the withholding of a 2013 friction report.
Lederman noted a lot of work has been done behind the scenes.
“There was a database, that’s been created by commission counsel, that collects all of the relevant documents provided by all participants,” Lederman said. “That database contains approximately 126,000 documents.”
Lederman also confirmed that commission counsel have completed 300 hours of interviews, with about 50 witnesses, ahead of the public hearing stage.
The initially estimated price tag for the judicial inquiry, when it was requested by Hamilton City Council in 2019, was between $5 million and $7 million.
The RHVP inquiry, to be presided over by Superior Court Justice Herman J. Wilton-Siegel, centres around a 2013 Tradewind Scientific report that analyzed friction levels on the parkway and suggested some safety issues.
The report recommended remedial actions and an investigation of the asphalt, but the findings went unnoticed for several years before the report was found in a locked computer folder in 2018.
The city completed an $8.5 million resurfacing in the spring of 2019.
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