A newly re-elected city councillor with Vancouver’s new governing majority party says the long-delayed plan to demolish the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts needs to be re-examined.
Sarah Kirby-Yung, a councillor with incoming mayor Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver, told Global News that much has changed since the 2015 vote to tear down the aging bridges that connect the downtown core with East Vancouver.
Chief among those changes, she noted, is the price — given the massive growth in construction costs over recent years.
“Clearly that’s going to be a lot more expensive in today’s dollars,” she said.
“I think what needs to happen moving forward is a reexamination of what the plan looks like as well as an assessment of, structurally, what is the lifespan of that bridge with respect to seismic issues.”
When the demolition was first approved seven years ago, the cost was pegged in the $200-million range.
The idea was to avoid putting those costs on taxpayers by leveraging the new condo development in the area.
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Developers would pay for the project through community amenity contributions (CACs), in exchange for density bonuses, with the result being a new neighbourhood of towers housing up to 12,000 people.
The plan also called for a new 11-acre park and a new arterial road connecting downtown to highway access through East Vancouver, approved in 2018 as a part of an area plan for northeast False Creek.
But with the plan stalled, Kirby-Yung said the mood around development has shifted. Less public appetite for new condos, she said, raises questions about how the work would be paid for.
“With affordability worsening over the last number of years in the city, what we really need to drive is rental housing and social and supportive housing, which typically do not generate the same level of development contributions,” she said.
Pete Fry, one of two councillors re-elected with the Vancouver Green Party agreed the plan needs fresh eyes, given the structures remain seismically unstable and continue to age.
“The viaducts as they exist now really don’t go anywhere, they never really did — they are kind of an anachronism of an idea of a massive freeway that was going to go through all of East Vancouver,” he said, referring to the scrapped 1970s-era plan to run a freeway through the area.
Fry pointed to the new St. Paul’s Hospital campus, which abuts the viaducts’ eastern entrance and exit, as another factor that needs to be looked at from a traffic and safety perspective.
Like Kirby-Yung, Fry said solving the funding riddle will be the key to moving forward with the project.
“It’s going to cost a lot of money and nobody’s really got the cheque in their hand,” he said.
“There’s a significant amount of soil remediation, the viaducts are not seismically stable. The cost to remove the viaducts and remediate the soil underneath which is contaminated from years of industrial use that predate the viaducts, is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
On Thursday Transportation Minister Rob Fleming weighed in, with a hint that Victoria could get involved, but made no promises.
“I’m glad that the new mayor and council are having a look at this,” he said. “We’re certainly willing to sit down with the City of Vancouver, mayor and council and talk about where they’re at.”
While council had initially envisioned the structures could be torn down by 2020, the latest update from city staff has suggested the earliest the work could begin is 2027.
Vancouver’s new mayor and council will be sworn in on Nov. 7.
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