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July
2001 Newsletter
$4.5
Million Fear
City
Council has now decided to allocate another $540,000 to
its attempt to stop the federal environmental assessment.
This brings the total spending on lawyers and lobbyists
to over $4.5 million. Expressway supporters are obviously
very nervous about the optics of this spending, hence the
attempt to suggest the bill will be paid by the provincial
government. However, the real issue is what is the Council
trying to hide?
Federal
environmental assessment is a well-established procedure
for reviewing the implications of decisions. Over 3,000
federal assessments take place every year. Why would someone
spend $4.5 million (and potentially much more) to avoid
an assessment? This is more than four times as much as the
Council has allocated in this year's budget for revitalization
of downtown Hamilton.
The
Council falsely claims it is trying to "speed up"
construction of the expressway. In fact, if it had just
cooperated with the federal assessment process, the panel
review could have been completed a year ago. The review
was called on May 6, 1999 and the rules of the process decree
that the panel can only use 13 months to complete its work.
That means the review could have been finished by June 2000
if the City had simply provided its information in a timely
manner.
This
makes it clear that the real problem driving the Council
is the fear of an independent scrutiny of its Red Hill decisions.
We know some of the reasons for this fear, such as the scandal
surrounding the Rennie Street dump. An independent review
might bring out that a 1989 expressway consultant study
revealed leachate flowing into the creek — a full decade
before the City was charged with permitting this to take
place, and eleven years before it was fined $480,000 for
this crime.
The
federal assessment would also thoroughly examine the likely
air pollution and health effects of the proposed expressway.
It would require the release of the secret studies on the
nationally vulnerable Southern Flying Squirrels living in
the valley. It would force the City to provide a source
for its projected traffic flows, and an explanation of why
it is suggesting that only a small part of the traffic will
be heavy trucks.
However,
the fear illustrated by over $4.5 million in spending to
stop the review suggests that other dirty secrets still
lie buried, and the Council is determined to keep them buried.
Perhaps more than anything else, the willingness to give
a blank cheque to the lawyers shows that Hamiltonians have
much to fear from a Red Hill Valley Expressway.
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