The P.E.I. Department of Transportation plans to get half a million dollars out of the federal government. If this outrageous abuse of tax dollars fails, P.E.I. taxpayers will be on the hook for the entire amount.
The scheme involves replacing Gunn’s Bridge on the Trout River in Millvale, Queens County. Already in sad shape, it was closed after Dorian damaged the structure and caused the dirt and rock causeway, throttling most of the river, to detach from the bridge. A call to the engineer in charge at Transportation, to hopefully learn the unnecessary bridge would be removed once and for all, revealed their plan.
The province must first build the bridge with P.E.I. tax dollars and then try to recover the money from Canadian taxpayers via the federal Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements fund.
In the meantime, the snowmobile lobby got Transportation Minister Steven Myers to cough up $50-$60,000 of taxpayers' money to build a temporary snowmobile bridge over the river in the middle of winter. A lot of money to let joy riders bomb around for a few months, disturbing the peace.
Gunn’s Bridge is a relic from the old days when people lived on the other side. Today, that side is heavily forested. After crossing the bridge, two steep seasonal roads climb one of the higher hills on the Island. Like every other seasonal road in the high hills of Millvale, they are so damaged from graders and erosion they’ve become sluices, funnelling water and silt into the river.
The runoff from these roads is serious and looks to be in violation of the federal Fisheries Act. An employee at Transportation told me these seasonal roads cannot be fixed without massive, publicly unacceptable infusions of tax dollars and closures need to be an option.
When I asked the Transportation engineer why they’d even consider rebuilding the bridge, he said people need access to their properties. It was clear to me that either he hadn't even bothered to look at a map or there was some other reason for approving this crazy project — because the two seasonal roads across the bridge both end up on the top of the hill at the Smith Road, a road Transportation inexplicably just spent a ton of money on. Nevertheless, Transportation planned to start construction this week on an unneeded bridge to nowhere.
The entire area around the bridge is an environmental mess. It’s in the river’s floodplain and during storm surges I’ve seen the dirt causeway and the bridge submerged. Four dirt roads converge at the bridge and all funnel silt into the river.
Premier King must explain why his government feels entitled to Canadian tax dollars to build a completely unnecessary bridge to nowhere during a time when all of us, and generations to come, will struggle to pay off pandemic debt. And if the Department of Transportation’s bid to access Canadian tax dollars fails, how will he justify spending half a million P.E.I. tax dollars on what could be a make-work project for friends of the PC party?
When residents on my unpaved two-kilometre section of the Millvale Road, a mud hole in spring, asked Transportation to gravel the road, we were told we might get on a list this year, and even if we did, the department could only afford to gravel a half kilometre per year. Yet up to $60,000 was squandered on a temporary snowmobile bridge. Earth Action lobbied MP Wayne Easter and will be organizing citizens to lobby MP Bill Blair, the minister in charge of the disaster fund, to refuse to hand over half a million dollars for a bridge to nowhere.
Sharon Labchuk is co-ordinator of Earth Action, a P.E.I. environmental activist organization, former leader of the Green Party of P.E.I. and resident of Millvale.
