Suspend Suspension Project?

     Dale West, News Editor

With a long list of parks and recreation capital projects already on the drawing board, where does a new Brilliant Suspension Bridge Regional Park sit on the City of Castlegar’s priority list? Furthermore, does the city have such a list?

Those questions were posed to council in a memo from the city’s chief administrative officer, Jim Gustafson. While the questions were directed to the outgoing council, the incoming council must deal with them in short order.
With a draft report on creating a new regional park to enable the restoration of the old bridge placed in the hands of council some months ago, Gustafson stated it was "odd" that council had yet to take an official position on the concept.

As the feasibility stage of the project is rapidly coming to a close, Gustafson suggested that a number of key issues remain to be resolved. Does the proposed service have a clear purpose and defined scope? Has a cost-sharing formula been determined? Who will govern the new service? And does council endorse the feasibility study?

Gustafson raised another issue at the council table: cost. "Our cost will be about 75 per cent of capital cost," Gustafson told council. In the longer term, though, he suggested maintenance costs would have "more impact."

Gustafson offered a list of no less than 17 parks and rec capital projects, including the Brilliant Bridge project, that could be worked on in upcoming months or put off for several years or more. That list included arena expansion, baseball field relocation and Complex soccer field removal, KMS, Millennium Walkway expansion, Pass Creek Bailey bridge project, Zuckerberg Island Suspension Bridge upgrading, Pioneer Arena upgrades and soccer field development.

"The availability of city and/or regional projects is limited," he wrote.

"Council needs to become more familiar with this project and do some prioritizing," Gustafson told council. With a list of park projects, where does this one fit?

He adds that there is some urgency to the project in that Highways would like to get the bridge off its books, either by assigning it to another organization or removing it.

"It’s a large ticket item."

Mayor Mike O’Connor agreed that the project carried a high price tag, one he couldn’t support having the city paying a disproportionately large share. "I couldn’t support a 75 per cent funding formula for a park to be created outside the city boundaries and the ongoing expense of it." Putting up a minimum of $750,000 for the bridge project when so many other projects had been identified inside the city without some kind of equitable formula, I couldn’t see how this could go ahead."

Considering that the city would like to build a bandshell and other "goodies" for the city, "This is at the bottom as far as I’m concerned."

O’Connor added that Highways has said in the past that it would cost $250,000 to remove the bridge, but it recently has only offered $150,000 towards the project. He’d like to know what happened to the other $100,000.