William Boei
Sun
Vancouver intends to oppose the core of the provincial government’s controversial Gateway Program, Mayor Sam Sullivan said Tuesday.
However, he said the city should also accept political reality and plan for the possibility that the Port Mann Bridge and the Trans-Canada Highway will be expanded over its objections.
Sullivan’s Non-Partisan Association majority voted to defer until next week a motion to reject the bridge and highway expansion while giving conditional approval to the rest of the program — new truck routes along both shores of the Fraser River and a new Pitt River Bridge.
Opposition council members accused Sullivan of being soft on Gateway despite warnings that it could destroy the city’s world-famous livability.
Sullivan denied it.
“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” he said in an interview, “but I am on record as supporting the official city position, being opposed to the widening and the twinning.
“I also recognize the political realities that are driving this.”
Transit advocates and environmental groups had urged council to lead the region in a fight against the project, which they say will cause sprawl into the Fraser Valley and more traffic congestion in the city.
“Please don’t roll over and play dead on this issue,” Eric Doherty of the Livable Region Coalition told council. “People are looking for leadership from the City of Vancouver.”
“We were not asked whether we want to become the loading dock for North America,” added Surrey resident Pierre Rovtar of the Fraser Valley Conservation Coalition.
But Rovtar and others questioned whether goods movement is the real agenda.
“This is not about creating capacity for the movement of goods,” said film producer Colleen Nystedt, a former council candidate and the daughter of Walter Hardwick, who helped stop freeway construction through Vancouver and was a driving force behind the region’s growth strategy.
“It is about land use decisions and particularly real estate speculation,” Nystedt said.
NPA councillors agreed with the COPE and Vision civic parties that Vancouver doesn’t need more traffic, but argued in favour of a staff recommendation to ask the province to include “mitigating” measures if Gateway goes ahead.
Critics, led by COPE Coun. David Cadman, said that amounts to giving a green light on a project that “basically takes the whole regional strategy and destroys it.”
The proposed mitigating measures include using tolls not only to pay for the project, but also to manage transportation demand; giving priority to transit, high-occupancy vehicles and trucks ahead of single-occupant vehicles; and not promoting the Pattullo Bridge as an un-tolled alternative to the Port Mann Bridge.
City staff said traffic diverting to the Pattullo and Queensborough bridges to avoid tolling on the Port Mann is likely to add to congestion on the Kingsway and Marine Drive corridors into southeast Vancouver, in addition to arterial roads that carry traffic from the highway in northeast Vancouver.
Cadman and Vision councillors Raymond Louie and Heather Deal also complained that by deferring the vote, the NPA is preventing the city from taking a clear stand at this Friday’s Vancouver Caucus, a meeting of council with local members of Parliament and the legislature.
But Sullivan said Gateway is not on Friday’s agenda because there is only so much time. He also deflected criticism that he has been lobbying federal politicians on Vancouver’s behalf without bringing up the Gateway project as one of Vancouver’s 30 priority issues.
“What are those 30 issues?” Cadman asked. “If this isn’t a priority for this city, what are they?”
Sullivan said he didn’t bring it up in Ottawa because the controversial parts of the Gateway Program — the bridge and highway expansion — are driven and will be paid for by the provincial government.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
