ANALYSIS | A bridge too far-fetched: How the infrastructure-planning sausage gets made in Winnipeg | CBC News

When the ancient Etruscans or Babylonians had to make a difficult decision — say, where to dig an irrigation canal — they sometimes relied on hepatomancy, which involved examining the liver of a sacrificial ram or heifer in an attempt to divine the will of the gods.

In modern times, the City of Winnipeg essentially does the same thing when it considers where to start a major infrastructure project.

Municipal leaders are sometimes forced to divine the will of their own all-powerful benefactors: elected officials at the provincial and federal level.

The new methodology has some advantages. There’s less blood and viscera to clean up after you consult with a cabinet minister, at least compared to butchering a bull.

The end result, however, can be pretty much the same. When a capricious higher power makes a decision that affects people on the ground, the results can be decidedly messy.

The City of Winnipeg, which does not possess the financial means to pay for new bridges, bus corridors or big new roads on its own, has no choice but to enlist the assistance the federal and provincial governments when it embarks on major infrastructure projects.

“We can’t do any major project without provincial or federal support. Like, it’s virtually impossible,” said Coun. Janice Lukes (Waverley West), city council’s public works chair.

As a prime example, she points to the Waverley underpass, which was not one of the city’s top infrastructure priorities when the funding was announced in 2015.

At the time, the Waverley underpass was considered a medium-term Winnipeg transportation-infrastructure priority, ranked below both the widening of Kenaston Boulevard and the replacement of the Louise Bridge, both of which were immediate priorities.

Land assembly for Kenaston, however, was not ready at the time and there was no agreement on where precisely a new Louise Bridge would go.

What was pressing was the Harper government’s desire to see Conservative MP Joyce Bateman get re-elected in Winnipeg South Centre.

Lukes said she didn’t want to approve the Waverley project, especially after the feds and province had only recently ponied up hundreds of millions for two other southwestern Winnipeg infrastructure projects: the extension of the Southwest Transitway and and new freeways through Waverley West.

But the Waverley cash was on the table during a short election window.

“We got the money and we got the underpass,” Lukes said. “They didn’t get Bateman.”

The Waverley underpass decision would prove to have long-lasting implications. Another project with the same priority as Waverley — at least according to the city’s 2011 Transportation Master Plan — was a replacement for the Arlington Bridge.

Completed in 1911, the Arlington Bridge had already outlasted its expected lifespan. Fearing a sudden closure, like the one that occured last week, engineers in Winnipeg’s public works department put together a replacement plan, as any dutiful public servant would do in the face of inaction at the political level.

In 2018, that plan came forward: a $330-million proposal to build a parallel bridge that would have been ready to carry traffic and pedestrians in 2024. But there was no desire to fund this project, even prior to a pandemic that brought construction to a standstill.

The Arlington design did not materialize in isolation. City council has a lot of expert, in-house advice to rely upon when the time comes to make major infrastructure decisions. Transportation engineers, public works officials and project-management professionals routinely provide this advice, both on a routine basis and on demand.

In 2020, for example, the public service produced a ranked list of the city’s top 45 infrastructure priorities. Nine of the top 10 projects on that list were water-and-waste upgrades the city had no choice but to undertake in order to meet the requirements of provincial environmental licenses or intergovernmental trade commitments.

The Louise Bridge, a top-tranche priority in 2011, ranked No. 26 on the 2020 infrastructure list. The Arlington Bridge ranked No. 31.

Lukes said she voted against this list on the basis the city sought no feedback about it ahead of time. A new list is coming early in 2024 in the form of a new Transportation Master Plan.

Geoff Patton, the city’s assets and project management director, says a lot of cold, hard arithmetic is going into the rankings.

The first priority, he says, remains meeting regulatory requirements. Maintaining service is a close second.

“We’re trying to make objective and reasoned recommendations for council,” he said, accepting the idea that elected officials may end up doing what they please in the long run.

“Infrastructure funding from other levels of government does influence where projects are in the priorities,” Patton said.

Lukes says she and her council colleagues are working hard to impress upon MLAs and MPs that the city has its own infrastructure priorities, backed by engineering, urban planning, project management and finance expertise.

“Our responsibility is to make sure we have all our data and facts. We develop relationships with all these players and try and get on the same page,” she said.

That effort alone won’t build Winnipeg a new Arlington Bridge. But it might avoid more unintended consequences.

If Winnipeg allows infrastructure planning to be subject to the whims of federal election cycles, then city councillors might as well put on their aprons and start cutting into livestock livers.