A News Analysis by Doug Draper
Niagara regional councillors will be heading off to Queen’s Park this May with a list of priority projects for the region it hopes the provincial government will support through whatever means, including tax dollars if dollars are what the project calls for.
Niagara Regional Headquarters
High up on the list of priorities the councillors have decided to ask government ministers to support at their annual Niagara Week at Queen’s Park is funding for the construction of what some of them have taken to calling the “hospital interchange.”
For those who may not know or may need a reminder, the hospital interchange is the one Niagara’s regional government is planning to run on and off the 406 Highway as it swings through the north Niagara community of St. Catharines. It would connect with Third Avenue Louth and would assist an existing Fourth Avenue interchange in taking growing volumes of traffic off the highway to a sprawling collection of strip malls and big box stores already doing business in St. Catharines’ west end, and to a super hospital for the region the Niagara Health System is opening later this March in the same area.
And here is the kicker. This new interchange, once tagged as low as $5 million, is now estimated to cost at least $30 million. And unless regional councillors can convince the province to contribute to the cost – they are hoping to convince the province to kick in at least half – Niagara’s property tax payers, from one end of the region to the other, will be on the hook for the whole thing.
What is more than a little frustrating about this whole issue, and it comes down to why I, as a media commentator and resident of Niagara, have a hard time being any kind of a cheerleader for this “regional priority,” is that some regional councillors and residents in this region are carrying on as if this whole need for a new interchange was only sprung on them over the past year or two.
Here is some news for these late bloomers. It wasn’t!
The need for a new interchange running off Hwy. 406 in St. Catharines was discussed in a report produced for the regional government by the consultant firm Matrix Innovations Inc. in May 2002 called the West St. Catharines Transportation Study.
“A new interchange along the Highway 4006, between Fourth Avenue and Third Avenue (west of First Street), is required within the next five to ten year period,” read an executive summary accompanying the report.
Not very many months after that report was released, the regional government’s planning department prepared a lengthy report of its own for the council then led by St. Catharines regional councillor Peter Partington as its chair. The report listed a number of reasons why regional planners felt it was not a good idea for the council to approve the Niagara Health System’s decision to locate the new hospital in west Catharines. One of the reasons was the need to build a new interchange off the 406 within the next five to 10 years.
The regional council of the day approved the west St. Catharines site for the new hospital anyway after hearing a presentation from then Niagara Health System CEO Debbie Sevenpifer warning that unless ‘Niagara spoke with one voice’ and approved the site, the province might reconsider its offer to fund a new hospital for the region.
All of this was reported in papers like Niagara This Week at the time, including the need to move forward with a new interchange if the west St. Catharines site for the hospital was approved.
Yet it wasn’t until more than five years later than the regional government began holding public information sessions on plans for the interchange and residents in the west St. Catharines area began coming out in droves to protest running traffic from the interchange down Third Avenue Louth, past residential homes and two elementary schools.
It is too bad more of these west St. Catharines residents did not begin speaking out six years ago when there was still time to join others, including doctors in the region, in trying to convince the regional council not to approve the location of a new hospital for Niagara at that particular site.
Indeed, there was a push on by some residents, doctors and the city council in Niagara Falls for the hospital to be placed in a more central location in the region, at a site further south along the Highway 406 corridor. But by the time the Niagara Health System tabled its so-called ‘hospital improvement plan’ in 2008, any hope for convincing municipal and provincial authorities, let alone the NHS, to consider building the new hospital at another more central site, where the infrastructure was already at hand to accommodate it, was growing dim.
The NHS had done everything but put shovels in the ground at the west St. Catharines site by the time it made public a ‘hospital improvement plan’ that confirmed what many doctors and others had been trying to alert the public too all along – that the new hospital would be more than a hospital for the St. Catharines area. It would be a hospital where maternity and a host of other acute care services would be pulled out of other aging hospitals in Niagara. It would be the site where most acute care services would be consolidated and therefore should be located more centrally in Niagara where all residents in the region had fairer access to them.
Niagara Health System’s new reginoal hospital complex is expected to draw significantly more traffic to an already congested west St. Catharines area.
But with the new hospital ready to open in west St. Catharines at the end of this month, it is obviously too late for that and any idea that the cash-strapped province will find hundreds of millions of dollars more to build another new hospital in Niagara to serve residents in the southern tier belongs in fantasy land.
I am not the only Niagara resident who has been following the health care saga in this region who feels it is far more likely that the Easter bunny will show up at your door with a basket of painted eggs than another new hospital for Niagara will be built any time in the next 20 or 30 years.
Indeed, the regional government will be lucky to get funding from the province for a hospital interchange it now has no choice but to build in a west St. Catharines area already choking with traffic before the new hospital is even open.
We should not be too shocked if the province’s Ministry of Transportation tells the regional government and City of St. Catharines that it is not the ministry’s usual policy to fund interchanges along highways when the regional and local councils made the decision to locate major facilities like hospitals and box stores at sites where the road infrastructure was not in place to accommodate them.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. PLEASE NOTE that NAL only posts views that include your first and last name.)
Niagara At Large 
We have been told many times that the new hospital is a St.Catharines Hospital!!!, as St. Catharines Councillor (and former mayor) Tim Rigby has oft times said,intended to replase the Hotel Deau and St Catharines General. Meanwhile, we in the south end of Niagara had no input on the location chosen, which is the worst location in the entire Niagara Region.
The people of St Catharines should pay for their mistakes, not people in the south end who have complained to deaf ears for all these years..I worked 12 years ago at GM Ontario Street in St. Catharines and tried many times to get on the 406 near the property where the new hospital is now located. There was constant gridlock in that area.
We are angry enough in the south end making us pay for a new interchange for this hospital is akin to rubbing salt in our wounds.
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It’s absolutely infuriating to me and many of us who fought to have the new “Super Hospital” built in a more central location. Particularly when I was hollering so loud, I was invited down to the NHS headquarters in the fall of 2008 to discuss the matter with Sevenpifer and her cohort Gloria Kane. They insisted they had done a thorough feasibility study and determined the west St. Catharines location met all their criteria and was fully serviced. I told them about the cloverleaf that would be required and asked them to do a cost/benefit study involving land that was more centrally located near the 406 and hgwy 20. They ignored me and lied when they insisted it was mainly a St. Catharines hospital. Let them pay for it.
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Hello Pat
Regrettably there is no “them” to pay for it. The Region will make sure that the pain will be well distributed. To paraphrase Pogo “we have met the taxpayer and he is us”.
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And I remember having discussions with Doug Draper at least as far back as 2008 (perhaps even earlier) about this interchange. I was an MTO media spokesman at the time and Doug wanted to know what the MTO policy was on paying for interchanges. I told him that the policy was that the proponent paid. In other words, whoever wanted the interchange had to pay for it. I know Doug used my remarks in some of his articles back then. So there is no surprise about who would have to pay.
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Pat
Yes they lied but did they NOT do only what they were told to do by elements in this Region that might be called “The Old Boy’s Club of St Catharines”? There definitely is more to this TAJ MAHAL’s “location”
than meets the eyes, was it pushed by Developers, by Councilors basically on their, the developer’s sponsorship list, by Law Firm associations or was it just a “Spin of the Dice” by Donkeys????? .
I have listened to Rigby’s proclamations over and over again that it is a “St. Catharines Hospital” and nothing more ….Therefore as such the Citizen’s of the Southern Tier of Niagara should not and “MUST NOT” pay “ANY MORE” for it’s upkeep WE HAVE PAID ENOUGH VICE PREMIER MATTHEWS.
We in Niagara wait months and months for Cataract surgery. yet if we have it done in Coburg its a matter of less than a month.WHY????
All the resources are going into that MONEY PIT in St Catharines.
The Welland Hospital Foundation has its hand out continuously begging for money from the residents Money that will end up in St Catharines and the same goes for Port Colbourne, Fort Erie and Niagara Falls…Smarten up people you can only bleed so much and those political wanna bees who are on those committees “Get a Job”
The problem that existed and still exists Pat is “JUST A SMALL GROUP” of concerned people come out Time and time again to “FIGHT for the RIGHTS and DIGNITY of the Southern Tier WHERE ARE THE REST? 50 People at the Last Meeting at the Arena in Welland? THEY the APPOINTED RABBLE LAUGH AT THESE TURN OUTS….NOTHING WILL CHANGE BECAUSE THE MAJORITY of THE PEOPLE THIS WILL EFFECT SIT ON THE HANDS AND DO NOTHING. THE MINORITY GROUP WHO SUPPORT THE NHS ARE FRONT AND CENTER (like constant commentator.”Outlier) AND THEN THERE IS US…………and the “Yellow SHIRTS” WHO ATTEND RALLIES and MEETINGS TO NO AVAIL>>>>
THANK YOU PAT
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So now, not only are we saddled with a hospital costing many millions of dollars that is a thirty to forty minute drive away from a large number of Niagara’s taxpayers…we can expect a traffic jam for the last couple of miles….UNLESS we pay millions for a needed highway upgrade. Yet, the Regional council of the day were warned of this and were asked (even begged) to look for a more suitable location. WOW! I guess the wrong decision was made after all…now we all have to pay for a new highway interchange too. I don’t think so. If this was the private sector there would be a reckoning by way of law suits. Perhaps there should be an investigation as to why the site chosen was so desirable. Because I certainly cannot see why any elected official would ever see this site as a benefit for Niagara’ to place its new hospital.
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