How the Corktown Footbridge got its name

I know I just posted a blog post about the Corktown Footbridge, and I've previously covered the opening, but in honour of St. Patrick's Day—and my just-over-one-eighth Irish heritage—I'm reprinting the article I wrote in this month's issue of the Centretown Buzz, telling the story of my time on the naming committee for what is now the Corktown Footbridge.

3D Thursday: Bronson press event

A couple weeks ago, the City's Infrastructure Services Department held a press event whereby they used Bronson Avenue as an example to showcase the many things that go on beneath the surface—literally—when the city rebuilds a road. Being dug up, it was opportune to demonstrate the watermains, feedermains, hydro, sewers, Bell, Rogers, gas, and other utilities that all have to squeeze under the street. As it happens, the media briefing was scheduled for the same time as Premier McGuinty's keynote speech at the AMO conference and most of the City Hall press corps was covering that.

Still there were a handful of journalists there and some stories came out of it, including two in the EMC and the Metro.

I went along to check it out, and managed to get a 3D photo of the journalists interviewing the City's engineers. In the vests from left to right are Ziad Ghadban, manager of municipal construction projects on the east side* of the city; Wayne Newell, General Manager of Infrastructure Services for the City; and Bruce Kenny, the project manager for the Bronson Avenue reconstruction project.

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

As it happens, just a few days before this media event, Ottawa Citizen columnist Kelly Egan wrote a column in which he rhetorically asked why it takes so long to build a road, given the length of time and the extent of disruption that has been caused by the Bronson Avenue construction on the street's businesses. I say "rhetorically" because he didn't bother to wait for an answer and instead assumed, without knowing the scope of the work, that the project could have been finished many times faster.

(Aside from living and working within two blocks of it, Bronson Avenue is one of the files I work on in Councillor Diane Holmes' office, and prior to working in her office I was on the Public Advisory Committee as the CCCA representative, so I'm rather familiar with the back end also. There are many legitimate complaints about ways the City or the contractors have screwed up in terms of communication, but the underlying work has many many constraints that make this a difficult job for any crew. Incidentally, nobody from the Citizen, including Egan, came to the Bronson Avenue media briefing.)

I had written back in January of 2011 about the former gas station at the southeast corner of Bronson and Gladstone, Norm Egan's Esso, and I suspect that's a clue to why Kelly Egan's attention is drawn to Bronson Avenue.

It's a pity that Egan put out that uninformed column about the construction process, because it took away from the more important story about the plight of the businesses on Bronson Avenue. He wrote such a column back in July focusing on this issue.

Bronson Avenue's businesses are at a disadvantage because they depend on passing traffic (both vehicular and pedestrian) for customers, and they don't have a BIA like most of the other commercial streets in Centretown do to promote the street with advertising campaigns. They're nearly all owner-operated. Many places have had to cut staff and reduce their hours, and most business owners are squeezing by, worrying about how they'll make the next mortgage payment on their house. The Quizno's has closed and is being renovated into a new restaurant.

The Bronson construction has an impact on everyone, from the noise endured by residents and business owners, to the detoured traffic cutting through neighbourhood streets, to the occasional disruption of water or power, and of course the massive drop in customers suffered by the businesses. The appearance of the street will improve significantly when the work is all done and the new landscaping is in, but the businesses will need to make it to that point if they're going to reap the benefits of a nicer street. Whenever you can, please visit some of the many restaurants, takeout places, hair salons and car shops along Bronson Avenue.

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images]

Google Street View comes to Ottawa

Google Street View is now available in Ottawa. This is great!

Go to http://maps.google.com, search for "Ottawa, on" (you can specify the street/address/intersection, too), and drag the little yellow character on the left to the street you want to view in street view. (Streets will glow blue when you click and hold him if they are visible on Google Street View).

From there, you can move the camera angle by clicking on the picture and dragging, you can follow streets by clicking the arrows along the lines running down the middle of the streets, and you can zoom in and out with the + - arrows at the top left.

This is a great addition to the arsenal of the armchair Ottawa photoblogger (as well as the armchair housebuyer and armchair city planner), along with:

- The City of Ottawa's eMap application, which has various overlays for topology, zoning, and historical aerial photos (back to 2002), plus these layers

- Microsoft Live Maps' bird's eye view, which gives you angled views from above from all four sides in two different zoom factors

- Google Maps' overhead aerial view

These photos are also good for seeing what used to be someplace, since they were all taken at some point in the past. It would be nice if Google eventually had a historical option, so that when they update their photos, you could see what it looked like in the previous version of the photos.

It looks like Google's Street View got Bank Street right as construction was starting between Somerset and Arlington, which makes for a good comparison when contrasting it against how the redeveloped Bank street is shaping up.

This is also the reason why Google's Street View isn't a replacement for blogs like this one: it only shows the most recent photos of the area, and can't track fast changes as well as passionate photobloggers. Furthermore, I can't be sure Google's view will always be around the way it is (and even though it is, it's copyrighted by Google), so taking my own photos is still the way to go.

Traffic Operations Division Tour, Part III + epilogue

This is Part III of the tour given to the Roads and Cycling Advisory Committee of the City of Ottawa's Traffic Operations Division at 175 Loretta Street, just off of Gladstone past the O-Train tracks. This is the building from which they monitor and control traffic operations, as well as prepare signs and signals for installation. At the end of this post is an epilogue on the lessons I learned from the tour and the subsequent RCAC meeting.

When you walk into the building, you can see the pride that its inhabitants take in their work to keep Ottawa's traffic flowing smoothly and safely. There's a display case of awards at the front of the foyer, and portraits of long-serving and retired employees grace the walls:

After the traffic control room (Part I of the tour) and the sign shop (Part II), we headed to the rooms where they program, assemble, and test the traffic signals and signal boxes.

Here are some demo units. In the back is a demo bus priority signal--the white bar above the red light indicates priority for buses. At the front is a demo of the pedestrian countdown signal which had been set up in the foyer of City Hall following this report, which was the basis for the approval of these units. Eventually, all crosswalks will have the countdown signals, starting with those at least four lanes wide.

There's a relatively small room in which they assemble the controller cabinets for each intersection. Each one of these boxes has about $12,000 worth of equipment inside, and a full intersection costs about $150,000. They're tremendously complex instruments.

Here, our tour guide Tom Fitzgerald, who is the supervisor of Traffic and Parking Operations, told us about the equipment inside. The controller units are made by an Ottawa-based company, which also makes them for the province. It takes in all the information--its programmed cycles, plus information from signal loops and buttons, and controls the signals. A device called a conflict monitor ensures that you don't get a situation like two directions getting a green light at the same time. If it detects a conflict (which could be caused by a short circuit), it puts all signals to flashing red.

Back in the signal assembly room, Jim Bell talks to the group and Tom looks on. Here is a stack of those pedestrian countdown signals ready to go:

Okay, so the three signals aren't as tall as Jim--he's well behind them. But they are big. Here's a pedestrian signal and a traffic signal facing each other. In the back are some large boots, and you can see that the top of the pedestrian signal is about waist-high:

And here's a larger signal with larger lamps for the red light and green arrow, plus a backing plate (I might have learned the proper name for these parts if I had been paying attention instead of taking photos!) For perspective, that's my pen next to the light:

Here are some four-way signals that hang in the middle of intersections in less-populated areas. I remember there used to be one at Byron and Churchill, which has since been replaced with a full intersection. One direction flashes yellow (proceed with caution), the other flashes red (stop, then proceed with caution if the way is clear).

Now that there's an idea of how big these signals are, you can start to understand how much room was occupied by these racks of assembled signals. The rack along the right wall was at least twice as long as the one on the left:

And that's the end of the tour. I still have some photos to share, though. Outside the building, you can see the Queensway on the right, and behind the parked cars you can make out some metal streetlight posts. Behind that is the O-Train trench:

And what would such a post be without photos of installation. Just a couple days after the tour, workers were working on the wiring at the intersection of Bank and Gilmour, and a police officer was directing traffic. Last August I posted a photo of a worker replacing the bulbs on a traffic light at Elgin and MacLaren.

Epilogue:

Unfortunately, the City cut tours of its facilities from its budget as a consequence of the 2004 Universal Program Review, and I think the City is worse off for it. This somewhat exclusive tour of the Traffic Operations Division gave a lot of insight into what the City does and how much work goes into keeping Ottawa moving smoothly. It gives a reminder that "City Staff" aren't a bunch of useless bureaucrats wasting taxpayer money, as the Mayor might have you believe, but rather they are people that do real, tangible work.

This became very clear when Rob Orchin, Manager of Mobility and Area Traffic Management, told us where we were in terms of spending the money budgeted for 2009 for the Ottawa Cycling Plan. Currently, nearly all of the requests for cycling infrastructure are handled by one person--Robin Bennett. This goes everywhere from adding a cycling route sign, to reviewing the geometry of a proposed major roadway to ensure enough space for cyclists, and everything in between. Robin is a cyclist and he is very passionate about doing the best job he can.

The Ottawa Cycling Plan, which was passed last year, promises to spend much more on cycling infrastucture--$5 million per year, up from less than one-tenth that amount. To cope with this increase, the Traffic Demand Management (TDM) department (which works to support ways to get people out of their cars) asked for more staff in the 2009 budget. Unfortunately, this request was declined, as part of the Mayor's drive to cut staff and due to the ongoing hiring freeze. As could be predicted, this has had drastic and costly repercussions.

The department had planned to spend the first part of 2009 on creating a list of cycling projects that would make the best use of the $1.5 million or so that was budgeted for this year. Whatever wasn't finished on this list would then carry forward and be the basis of the 2010 list, and so on. But because of the staff shortage, they had to contract that out to the consultants that developed the cycling plan instead of doing it in-house. See this Sun article from Monday about Councillor Maria McRae's discovery of just how much the City is wasting with this type of arrangement:

But there are other factors that make this molehil into a mountain of a problem. The 53-day bus strike kept the TDM department completely busy trying to find ways to help people who needed alternatives to the bus--things like carpooling, etc. This diverted resources away from creating that project list.

Then the Federal Stimulus package came in and added a whole new dimension. Since cycling funds are scarce, the department tries to get the best use of them by adding cycling facilities alongside larger road projects. This requires the larger road project to go ahead, but it isn't guaranteed that any stimulus project will go ahead. So Rob Orchin and his team have to juggle cycling projects that depend on road projects that depend on stimulus funds, and so on. It's very confusing.

Another complicating factor of the stimulus package is that cycling projects budgeted in 2009 are usually tendered in the fall and built in 2010. But the stimulus funding will make a lot more work in 2010, driving up the price. So it is beneficial to get as many of the cycling projects built in 2009 as possible, which is hard because of the staffing shortage.

Whatever ends up getting planned, the folks in the Traffic and Parking Operations department will do a good job of implementing it!

Budget time at City Hall

It's that time of year again, when our fair City looks at its financial position for the following year, sees a mess, then proposes to cut vital community services to make up the difference.

As part of the requisite song-and-dance, town hall meetings are held for each ward for the public to come out and ask questions. Five central-area wards (Somerset, Capital, Kitchissippi, Alta Vista, and Rideau-Vanier) combined their meetings to this past Monday, November 24, from 7-9pm at the Assembly Hall at Lansdowne Park (which, by the way, is located in the Civic Centre, by going to the rear of the building and going down the stairs next to the upramp. Pity that the Lansdowne Park website and on-site directional signage doesn't tell you this.)

The meeting was fairly well attended, though there were plenty of spare seats.

They had a good system for speakers: instead of having everybody line up and wait, they gave out numbers early in the meeting so that people could remain seated. In all, 37 people were scheduled to speak, though some people left before their turn came up.

By luck, I was in the right place at the right time and got a low number.

I pointed out that all of the attention in communities and the media and by the many individuals and groups who came out to meetings such as this one was centred around a mere $10M in social spending, and that this was a red herring compared to the tens of millions of dollars of road-building projects in the budget, each of which add annual operating costs in future budgets. Later in the night, Old Ottawa South Community Association (OSCA) President Mike Jenkins echoed this when he lamented that one of the wealthiest cities in the country is talking about cutting daycare, volunteer-run rinks, and community centres.

Ted Horton of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa asked for support for the U-Pass pilot project, which would see $125 added to each U of O student's tuition fees in return for a transit pass. There is a real possibility that this pilot will finally come to fruition after years of hard work and negotiations by University groups and Councillors alike.

I happened to step out of the room again and caught the CTV cameras interviewing Ted before leaving at 8:30 to file their report:

Delegation #10 made a splash. I didn't catch the name of their garderie, but they did say that they were the only francophone daycare, I believe in all of Ottawa. A dozen or so of them on both sides of the aisle stood up, all wearing little blue scarves to represent the childcare services slated to be cut:

She then presented each of the Councillors at the table, plus City Treasurer Marian Similuk, with a scarf. Similuk, Holmes, and Doucet all donned their scarves.

Other interesting points that I caught included:

• Christina Tessier, Director of the Bytown Museum, described the perennial stress that community service groups like hers face: Every year, the draft budget threatens to cut funding to programs like the Bytown Museum. While there is a decent chance Council will reinstate the funding, staff still must face the possibility that their job will not be there January 1st. Ms. Tessier said that after many years of this, she has made the difficult decision to leave her position for a more stable job in the private sector. I encountered this problem with my staff each year while on the board of a community group which used to run City programs.


• Someone from the McNabb Skatepark, which the budget threatens to cut entirely, pointed out that a skatepark caters to all income levels, that it promotes health and wellbeing through physical activity, and that kids will skateboard anyway, so we'd be better to provide a positive alternative to, say, the human rights memorial!


• City Hall denizen Catherine Gardner, of Bells Corners, pointed out that the rinks in Bells Corners are proposed to close yet kids won't be able to get to rinks in other parts of the city because of transit cuts!


• As the official meeting closing time passed, Helen from People for a Better Ottawa compared the Consumer Price Index, which has an inflation this year of 2%, with the informal "Municipal Price Index", which is going up by 4.1%. This is because municipalities don't buy much bread or milk--things in the CPI--but lots of asphalt, concrete, and other materials whose prices are inflating quickly. Councillor Holmes said that Statistics Canada had been working on a MPI, but they took the person off of that project. Councillor Doucet pointed out that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is developing a MPI, on his recommendation.


• Loretto Beninger, who is the vice-chair of the City's volunteer Arts, Heritage and Culture Advisory Committee, described the philosophy of the City's budget process, which dates back to the 1950's "grooved thinking" or "male breadwinner" model. In this outdated model, everything that was important to men (such as roads for a man to get to work, sports recreation for him when he gets home, plus sewers and garbage collection) was deemed "core" services, and womanly activities (such as arts and culture) were deemed "special interests". Despite the tremendous leverage in terms of return on investment that cultural spending brings to Ottawa (e.g. in tourism dollars), this model based on gender relationships continues to this day.


• For the first time in 8 years, average tax assessments in Capital Ward are roughly at the municipal average. This is not the case in Somerset Ward, particularly in Dalhousie, where assessments are skyrocketing. This will magnify the effects of the inevitable tax increase.

The delegations finished at 10:30pm--an hour and a half past the scheduled closing time. By this point, two councillors had left, as had much of the audience who had already spoken.

Next week, Council will be hearing delegations from the public from Monday, December 1 until however long the delegations go. Originally, they were planning to have delegations on Monday and Tuesday, with Council to debate and decide on Wednesday to Friday, but last I heard, they were booking delegations into Thursday afternoon! It's going to be one hell of a week (or two) at City Circus!

People for a Better Ottawa are holding a rally at City Hall on Monday, December 1. At 10am residents are called upon to fill Council chambers to the rafters, then at noon there will be a rally at the newly-named Marion Dewar Plaza (formerly Festival Plaza--it's the Laurier entrance of City Hall), to "ask City Council if people matter as much as sewers and roads".

May we live in interesting times...

Light Rail Now @ the Gladstone

This morning, Councillors Clive Doucet and Christine Leadman held a press conference at the Gladstone Theatre on their proposal called Light Rail Now: Our Path Forward / Vision for Ottawa's Transportation Master Plan.

I went there to not only take in the subject matter (discussed below), but also to get an opportunity to photograph the inside of the redeveloped theatre, as a follow-up to my previous post on the reconstruction of the facade.

The inside foyer is simple in format and elegant in decoration, with two chandeliers, tile floors, a nice bar and coat-check.

Red carpets on either side take you in to the main theater, which for this press conference was crowded with people. (Pardon the blurry photo)

The main thrust of this plan is to build Electric Light Rail with eight stations along Carling instead of the Ottawa River Parkway, and to do it in the next five years. Both Councillors Doucet and Leadman presented their take, followed by transportation expert Morrison Renfrew, who reviewed the technical details and how they got to the estimates.

Councillor Doucet started off introducing the reasoning behind this proposal, including the increasing the usual (though still valid) arguments about how peak oil will cause operating costs of urban transportation systems to skyrocket. His presentation was punctuated with bouts of applause from the audience.

Doucet pointed out that their system will build everything inside the greenbelt in five years, and everything outside the greenbelt in ten years. By comparison, in 2018, City Staff's plan will have built only the downtown tunnel, with spur lines to Tunney's Pasture and Blair. He also added that most Councillors will be dead by the time the "full" system, which still doesn't send rail to the suburbs, will be built. (To which City Transpotation Committee Chair Alex Cullen, who was in the back of the audience, drew a raucus laugh from the audience by asking if that was a death threat!) In addition to Cullen, Councillors Diane Deans and Diane Holmes were also in the audience.

Councillor Leadman followed, discussing the price tag and where the money for this will come from. Because their plan makes earlier and more extensive investments in rail transit, there is no need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on buses and busways, and the operating cost of the system is also lower (namely because a bus costs $80/hour to operate and can hold 100 passengers, requiring another bus and driver when ridership increases; whereas a double-articulated train can carry 250 passengers at a cost of $125/hr, and is a smoother ride whether you're sitting or standing). They specifically designed their system to fit within the budget envelope of the current plan, in order to show that you can get much more for the same price.

Following the presentations by the two Councillors, transportation expert Morrison Renfrew outlined the project.

He started by referring to Jane Jacobs' mantra that transit drives development, and illustrated it with the following two photos of Toronto's Yonge Street in 1950 and 1985. 30 years after the construction of the subway line, the street had plenty of development.

This is a key aspect to the Carling Avenue corridor: not only is there plenty of activity already there throughout the day (driven by the many hospitals, clinics, hotels, etc. along this corridor), but there is plenty of room for new develompents to be built. This will bring in funds to the City in terms of Development Charges, which are a considerable source of revenue for the City, and which will help pay for the rail. Compare this with the Ottawa River Parkway, which is in effect a protected space that will never see any development: it will be a "drive-thru" transit corridor, completely useless to the people who travel through it.

He also went through a section-by-section review of where the train would go and how it would be built. For example, in this photo below, he explained that you could cross the Queensway (Hwy 417) by merely tunneling through it. You'd need only to make some adjustments to the Westbound onramp.

As shown in the map below (as always, click to enlarge), the train would go between Lincoln Fields and the O-Train, and would go up the O-Train line to Bayview (which would be converted to Electric Light Rail for that section) and continue through downtown. The O-Train would remain in service and would be extended North to central Hull, removing the need for many buses to cross the Ottawa river carrying Gatineau-bound Ottawans. Mr. Renfrew said there are a dozen or so different ways to accommodate both the O-Train and ELRT on the same stretch.

The trains would be kept at the Bowesville rail yard site, which has already been approved, but would get there via the Southeast Transitway, saving the cost of converting the O-Train. Keeping the O-Train as it is (though extending it) and having the rail from the south come in along the Southeast Transitway (which was designed to be converted to rail) and into downtown from the East will help provide alternatives to people who want to travel between the East and South ends without necessarily going downtown, and will balance the passenger load coming into downtown from the East and West.

It will also provide rail sevice to the developing South-end communities, which is something demanded by the area's residents and Councillors alike.

It is refreshing to hear Councillors think for themselves and not be spoon-fed by Staff. This is the type of plan that Ottawa needs. There are a few details that need refinement, but it has a much more aggressive (and beneficial) timetable than the bus plan proposed by City Staff. I hope that Council will take this and run with it.

Councillors Leadman and Doucet will be presenting this plan as part of the Transportation Master Plan discussion at this Wednesday's Joint Transporatation & Transit Commitee meeting on Wednesday morning at City Hall. They'll want your support there!

A Tempest in a Paramedic Po(s)t: a detailed historical analysis

The media are doing it again. They're falling for (and contributing to) neoconservative flamebait by sensationalizing a non-story that accuses City Council of wasting money it didn't spend. I hate it when they do that, because it inevitably results in me spending five hours into the night carefully deconstructing and documenting their errors.

It has to do with the paramedic post on the former Beaver Barracks site at 424 Metcalfe (intersection of Catherine), and accusations of "poor planning" relating to it.

The culprits:
- The Ottawa Sun (article in question) (link may not work after a while)
- CBC Online (article in question)
- The Canadian Taxpayer Federation (representatives of which are quoted in above articles)

Here's a photo of the site in question:

So what's the issue? Well, a Paramedic Post built by the City of Ottawa for $600,000 in 2004 is being demolished and rebuilt on a different part of the same site. From this brief description, which is the same simplistic angle taken by the Sun (see yesterday's cover, inset) and CBC Online (the headline was "New $600K Ottawa ambulance station to be torn down, rebuilt"), you'd think that the City had just spent $600,000 with nothing to gain. And the taxpayer zealots are firing all guns.

Adam Taylor, research director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, says this is "poor planning at best and it's incompetence at worst." (CBC article)

Kevin Gaudet, the Ontario director for the CTF, cites his flawed dogma in the Sun article: 'To have a new building that has to be torn down to accommodate a newer building, at the initial expense of the taxpayer, is an absurd waste of money, Gaudet says.' (my emphasis; note, this is a quote from the article paraphrasing Gaudet, not a direct quote)

Some commenters on the CBC article take the bait and blame the city for gross incompetence, including Gary68, who "seriously demand[s]" that Councillor Diane Holmes resign.

Anyway, they're all completely wrong, many times over.


Now, I'm not an apologist for City Council (nor am I necessarily an opponent), but in the wake this bombardment of illogic I must come to the defense of Council and Councillor Holmes. You see, I did something most people didn't think to do: I actually looked at the evidence.

Let's start by explaining the current situation. The City of Ottawa owns some property (called the "Beaver Barracks site", named after the temporary buildings built during WWII for the Department of Defense) which is designated to be used for affordable housing. The site has also hosted community gardens since 1997. In 2004, the City of Ottawa constructed a building on the site for paramedics to rest while waiting for calls. This particular location is useful because the proximity to the Queensway and to Centretown arteries allows ambulances to serve Centretown well.

A new affordable housing development on the site will require this Paramedic Post to be relocated within the site (the new one will be completed before the old one is demolished).


Despite the initial cost of the Paramedic Post, both the Sun and the CBC report that this relocation will cost only $100,000, and that the cost will be borne by the CCOC. But these details are buried within both stories; the Sun and the CBC both chose to inflate the issue by parading the $600,000 figure, allowing the taxpayer "defenders" to stick to their dogma.

Gaudet claims that no matter the cost to relocate, $600,000 was misspent because that was the initial cost spent by the City, and that claim is absurd. If I were evicted from my apartment and had to move to a comparable apartment with equal rent, I would be out the money it costs to transport my furniture to a new house--not the price of my furniture!

When Taylor was told that the cost to replace the building was only $100,000, he still insists it's money wasted by the government, since the CCOC project is funded by the government.

Now let's start to deconstruct this.


First, was it a poor financial decision?

In mid 2007, the City issued an RFP (Request-for-Proposal) for social housing to be developed on the site. The Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation (CCOC), which is a non-profit organization specializing in providing affordable housing in central Ottawa, won the competition by a large margin at committee (Council approval here), with a $24.1 million proposal, 55% of which would be funded by governments (approx. $2.5M Federal, $4M Provincial, and $6.9M Municipal).

This means that of the $100,000 expense, only $55,000 is borne by governments at all levels.

When the Paramedic Post was approved, the City did not have any firm plans for the site (as I demonstrate in the last section below). In order to prevent conficts with a future development, the City would have had to wait until plans are drawn and executed, or build the paramedic post on another site.

To find another site would have required the city to purchase land from a private landholder, and land in Centretown would have certainly cost more than $55,000.

If they had waited, they would also have lost out. Inflation on the $600,000 investment between 2004 and 2008 would be $61,000, according to the Bank of Canada's Inflation Calculator (Yes, that uses the Consumer Price Index, which does not necessarily reflect construction costs, which I believe have risen faster than inflation).

Even if it didn't cost more, waiting would have been hazardous as well. Remember, it's not just about construction and spending, a Paramedic Post is about the safety of Citizens of Ottawa. The purpose of this Paramedic Post is to provide paramedics a place to park their ambulances so that they can swiftly respond to calls. Ambulance response times have been below targets in Ottawa for many years, and downtown was identified as needing more attention.

Now, take any of the figures, $100,000, $55,000, or $600,000 and divide by four years of operation (five, when you consider the CCOC-built Paramedic Post will not be ready until 2009), and it is much less than the cost of operating an ambulance with two paramedics (and that's only counting one shift!). Had we not built the building, how many more ambulance teams would we have had to sit on duty?

When the post was built in 2004 (or more specifically, when it was approved in 2003), there were no specific plans for the site. I dare anybody to look at interminably-undeveloped Albert Street and Transitway in the escarpment, or the lack of proper transit downtown, and try to claim that we should have waited for the City to implement plans before making this investment in safety.

It is not a waste to spend taxpayer money; only if it is spent poorly. Paradoxically, Council's poor record in planning suggest that it was actually a good planning decision for this project to go ahead as soon as was possible.


When did they make the decision to build it?

Logic and analysis aside, people are still calling for the heads of Diane Holmes and of Council. So let's take a look back in time and see where this all came from. The online minutes of Council and Committees are a good help. (as an aside, I think the Mayor's desire to spend $150,000 to go paperless is a much bigger waste of taxpayer money; the current online minutes seem to work well enough for this research...)

According to the Beaver Barracks development website, the RCAF Beaver Barracks were built on the site in the 1940s, with residences along Catherine, the Ottawa Auditorium along O'Connor, and a mess hall along Argyle. The site has a drawing from 1956 showing the site layout.

The site goes on to say that the auditorium was demolished to make way for the Metro Central Y in 1967, and the barracks themselves were taken down in 1991 leaving a field. It is now listed as a Brownfields site, according to this document from the province (translated in to html by Google). --Incidentally, the City is contributing $300,000 to clean up the toxic waste in the brownfields site, but I don't hear the Taxpayer's Federation whinging about that.--

At some point during this period, according to Councillor Cullen's recollection in a 2003 meeting, this site had been transferred to the City of Ottawa in a land swap between the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton (RMOC, precursor to the City of Ottawa), the Department of National Defense and the National Capital Commission.

Fast forward to September 2003. The City of Ottawa has identified the need to build 12 Paramedic Posts in high-density areas (reduced from an earlier estimate of 21 posts). Funds were already set aside to build them, they just needed to find places that were appropriately zoned. The Planning and Development Committee was urged by Staff to rezone this site to include such a Post in the permitted uses. Quoting from the Planning and Development Committee report's summary of the presentation by Anthony Di Monte, Director of the City's Emergency Medical Services department:

"In the Centretown area, 28% of the life-threatening calls emanate from this
high-density area, representing some 10,000 emergencies. It is an
essential public and health safety issue that needs to be
addressed. ... This area lacks the capacity to respond to an
extremely high level call volume. Having said that, funds were set aside
to build posts where deemed necessary and through the planning process this area
was identified. It is City land and ideal because of the call
volume." (my emphasis)

--Let me pause the history lesson here for a moment to point out that at the time of this meeting in 2003, Diane Holmes was not a City Councillor, and nor were half of the 24 people on Council today in 2008. So Gary68's implication that Holmes is responsible for this alleged boondoggle is grossly misplaced, and arguably defamatory.--

The idea for using the site for affordable housing dates as far back as 1999, when the RMOC voted against having the site "be the subject of further planning studies and that a portion of the site be considered for affordable housing in the future." (PDF reference, or translated to HTML by Google). It's unclear whether it was already set aside for affordable housing by that point and the motion was to consider developing it, but by the 2003 PDC meeting, it was clear that affordable housing was to be one of the main purposes for this site.

Interestingly, affordable housing was not the sticking point in the debate on the Paramedic Post. Instead, it was concern that the Paramedic Post would push out the community gardens maintained on a portion of the site by the Bytowne Urban Garden Society (BUGS) since 1997.

An avalanche of community support called on the committee to make development of a Paramedic Post and affordable housing contingent on the existence of the garden. This contingency, staff said this does not represent "good planning". But this is not a foreboding of the "bad planning" accusations referred to in 2008--staff were still supportive of the ambulance post.

Councillor Cullen was very persistent in expressing his concern that the ambulance post would reduce the potential for affordable housing spaces, but it appears staff never answered his question of how many spaces could be gained by not locating the ambulance post there. This, of course, still begs the question of how much it would cost to locate it elsewere and whether that gain would have been worth it. In retrospect, we now know that the Post is incorporated as the ground level of a mixed-used building, so in an alternate reality, the CCOC might just as well have made the space into a convenience store and no additional housing units would have been gained.

Russell Mawby of the Housing Branch replied at the time that "EMS does not
significantly impact the housing development potential on the site" and "Housing is proceeding on the premise there will be an EMS facility on the site." Grant Lindsay, the City Manager answerable for the agenda item, said "the site could possibly accommodate all three uses quite comfortably."

The rezoning carried at Council, with Dwight Eastman (West Carleton) dissenting on the recommendation to include the community gardens.

As for the actual construction of the ambulance site, I can't find any reference for when it was built, or--more importantly--when it was approved. The closest is a few thousand dollars in approvals for Architectural ($51,000) and Environmental Consulting Services ($15,000)--ironically, one is listed for this "Ambulance Post" and the other for an unspecified "Proposed Paramedic Post" (the latter of which may not be the one in question). This lack of documentation implies the approval to build the paramedic post was buried in an annual budget, probably under project funding for EMS. So the decision was not exactly a prominent one, and the nuance of the now-acknowledged financial implications were far from apparent--even the CTF didn't catch it at the time!


Building the affordable housing

Finally, in August of 2004, the City issued an RFP for 220 units of affordable housing, 140 of which to be situated at the Beaver Barracks site. $7.3 million in funding was allocated to support this site.

This is probably after the paramedic post was built, likely after it was designed, and almost certainly after it was approved. Since my main point is to disprove the claim that it was a boondoggle, this timing confirms there were no plans for the housing when the paramedic post was built.

To further support this, in June 2006 on an unrelated issue at the Beaver Barracks site, it was reported that "A design plan is expected in 2006, and site development could begin as early as the summer of 2007."

In July 2007, the Community and Protective Services Committee approved a proposal by the CCOC to build 100 affordable housing units on the site (approved by Council here). Even then, there was no detailed site plan, only an outline of the site, with a square in the corner marked "location for Paramedic Post" (at right).

This was the first opportunity for a developer or architect to look at the existing site layout and see where the Paramedic Post would fit in with the proposed number of units.

It wasn't until May of 2008 when the detailed design was presented to the Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (PDF of proposed design). Detailed 3-D renderings are available online, as is an interactive plot of current, Phase I, and Phase II site plans. Remarkably, the CCOC's design proposal appears to include over 250 units, 175 of which qualify as affordable housing.

In Phase I, they will build a new building with 105 apartments and a new paramedic post on the ground floor. In Phase II, they will demolish the old paramedic post and build another building along Catherine Street.

Other virtues of the project put the nail in the coffin on the "wasting taxpayer dollars" argument. According to this proposal (PDF) for the project, Phase II expects a similar investment from the City of Ottawa as Phase I, except they will not need the City's $30,000 per door capital grant. They are also budgeting $56,000 for public art, and are making a number of inroads in sustainable development, including construction to LEED Silver and/or Gold standards, partnership with Vrtucar, and of course its neighbours the YMCA and BUGS.

After a careful and thorough analysis, I think that Council made a prudent decision at the time, and in retrospect, the investment in the safety of citizens was not excessive compared to any alternatives. When all is said and done in 2009, $700,000 will have been spent, $600,000 of it directly by the City, and we will have had the services a Paramedic Post for five years, situated in brand new facilities.

But then, it's easier to just scream "WASTE!", isn't it? Shame on the Sun and CBC for kowtowing to sensationalists and highlighting their misrepresentations in headlines and giant print.