Some city staff believe an historic trestle bridge on the former Ontario Reformatory lands needs to be removed, a city report shows, though council directed staff to work toward conservation of the provincially-owned structure.
Removal of the Eramosa River bridge, which sits about 100 metres north of Victoria Road, is identified as the preferred option in an appendix to the draft stormwater master plan update approved by council in March.
That plan has since been finalized by staff and is currently out for public comment, with a Sept. 17 deadline.
Weeks after council’s approval, news broke that the province had begun the process it’s required to follow in order to remove the bridge. In response to subsequent calls from Guelph Hiking Trail Club (GHTC) to save the bridge, city council to unanimously approve a motion directing staff to work with the province on “the options for conservation.”
It’s unclear if council was aware of the staff preference to remove the bridge when that motion was passed; there was no discussion of staff’s stance during that meeting.
Asked about the potential conflict between the council direction and the report’s preferred option, project manager Colleen Gammie, who’s responsible for the stormwater management master plan, explained the bridge was determined to be a “public safety hazard” from an engineering perspective because of bank erosion beneath the bridge.
“However, the city acknowledges that this is owned by Infrastructure Ontario and there are other ongoing and completed studies and needs to be considered which is why the report clearly states ‘the preferred solution (for this site) should be determined through a separate process,’” Gammie explained via email, referring to the reformatory heritage district conservation study, the Guelph Innovation District secondary plan and the trails master plan.
Infrastructure Ontario manages property assets on behalf of the provincial government.
The stormwater master plan estimates the cost of ‘removing the threat’ at $960,000.
“The technical details and cost estimate are provided as bank stabilization inputs related specifically to stormwater and are intended to be factors to consider as part of a separate process/as part of any future work around the bridge by the appropriate party at that time,” Gammie added.
Efforts to reach Infrastructure Ontario for comment weren’t immediately successful.
According to a previous Letter to the Editor from John Fisher, GHTC president, the province commissioned an engineering company to evaluate the bridge and pegged the cost of demolition at $350,000.
Hired by GHTC, an international company that specializes in wooden structures put the same price tag on repairing and re-purposing the bridge.
The bridge, which is on the city’s municipal heritage registry listed under the reformatory’s address (785 York Rd.), was built in the early 1900s as a way to deliver materials to and from the reformatory, in order to cross the Eramosa River.
“Limited information is available on this structure. The trestle is an early, and now rare, type of railway bridge in that it is constructed entirely of timber,” states a 2013 University of Waterloo-prepared report on bridges within the Grand River Watershed.
Trail users regularly used the bridge until last winter, when the west side partially collapsed.
Public comments regarding the stormwater master plan can be submitted to Reg Russwurm, the city’s manager of design and construction, via email to [email protected].
