https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/2024/04/04/it-aint-over-till-its-over-is-it-over

JUDY WAYTIUK

THE other day, I dropped into the Portage and Main circus. The elderly Asian man at the little convenience store there told me, in halting English, “I hope property owners keep open.”

He has nowhere to go. He’ll have to figure it out. City council’s decision is not a reprieve while debate over closing the concourse continues, and the decision perhaps gets reversed.

It will close. Council prettied up the mayor’s abrupt, unilateral decision with the gentlest possible knuckle- rap (though the vote on the amendment was 14-1) for his colossal pratfall in announcing the closure without a shred of the information needed to do so sensibly.

Not actual costs, economic impacts, effects on businesses clinging to survival. Not the damage dried-up foot traffic will do to Winnipeg Square shops, to hotels, restaurants, or to the property values on which taxes from all those shops and businesses and parkades and hotels are based.

Without pondering the thrill of crossing Portage and Main in January at -30 C with 40-kilometre winds in a wheelchair.

Because when you close the circus, surface pedestrian crossing is your only option.

Remember: the sole reason the mayor chose to open the surface was so he could close the circus.

Council cobbled together a face-saving repair to his blunder and threw a sympathetic bone to the Bruce Head Wall, which is in the centre of the circus. The Winnipeg Arts Council — from whom the mayor just pulled an annual $500,000 that had enabled them to fulfil an essential purpose, commissioning public art, will try to figure out the problem.

But they really should just find competent art historians to document the Wall in torturous detail for history, since the public will never see it in situ again.

Locating a site for a 415-foot massive circular piece of three-foot-thick, 12-foot-high sculptured concrete slab? Figuring out what to do with its backside, even if you find a spot? Assuming you could cleanly cut it up into roughly 50 four-tonne blocks and haul them out of the doomed circus?

Scotiabank’s escalators won’t carry them up. I’m exhausted after weeks of battling alone, until the Building Owners and Managers Association of Manitoba and the Downtown BIZ blazed up at the last minute, firing desperate salvos across the civic ship of state’s inexorably advancing bow.

I’m tired of constantly observing the mayor’s $73-million number is patently wrong, and seeing that simple truth ignored in favour of the shiny-bauble news story: “Widow battles to save husband’s art.”

But the media ran with that number, unquestioning, from the get-go, and cemented $73 million into their files — and the public mind. Then the shiny-bauble news story became “Historic intersection to reopen to people.”

Nobody has checked the glaringly visible arithmetic.

Concourse repairs plus new accesses — $35 million — not $73 million.

Sewer/water main repairs, $13 million. Rip up/ replace the intersection plus traffic management, $25 million. Total: $38 million.

Traffic disruption and $73 million were the mayor’s reasons to shutter the concourse. They have been blindly parroted by journalists since March 1. The sole questioning analysis came in brief coverage quoting the building owners association protest letter, and in op-eds penned by vested interests (this being one).

The mayor also wished to lift the decision-making burden for civic authorities decades into the future. He very much deserves credit for at least making a decision frantically ducked by Brian Bowman — the mayor who held that 2018 plebiscite, simultaneously ignoring the leaking concourse membrane which was, even then, degrading under his watch.

But the $38 million worth of sewer and water work still needs doing. Stantec’s report documents the needed work for over two pages.

It will mean shredding and replacing the intersection and East Portage Avenue as well, and five years of disrupted traffic; there are even pretty, multi-coloured diagrams.

Does the mayor consider $38 million and five years of awful traffic also unacceptable?

On June 8, 2016, an enormous sinkhole in downtown Ottawa swallowed three lanes of Rideau Street. Cause: a broken water main. A year later, another hole gaped open. Hasty repairs hadn’t gone quite right.

On Feb. 7 of this year, a sewer line broke in south Winnipeg. Roughly 230 million litres of raw, putrid sewage belched into the Red River before it was fixed 16 days later — temporarily. Traffic on Abinojii Mikanah was terrible. On March 13, a sewer pipe collapse forced closure of a south Winnipeg community centre/daycare for more than two weeks.

If your sewer and water department tells you something needs doing, you do it.

But that means more costs. When crosswalks go in (possibly $10 million), they’ll have to be ripped up, along with the intersection, to do the sewer and water work. The mayor wants those crosswalks by July 1, 2025, the same deadline the public service got to produce all the information the mayor apparently didn’t need to make his decision in the first place.

So, another $20 million, maybe? Nobody wanted the concourse closed. Not the consultants, not Stantec, not the public service, not the shelved 2018 Dillon report.

This is what happens when you don’t think something through, and you grab the wrong decision because you skipped your homework.

It could blow up in your face. Or implode. Literally. Winnipeg, and what’s simply known across Canada as The Wall, will pay the cost. One way or the other.

Bruce Head’s widow, Judy Waytiuk, may be exhausted, but she isn’t quite ready to quit.