Another setback means no end in sight for Centennial Bridge project

The Higgs government is defending yet another delay to the refurbishment of Miramichi's Centennial Bridge, the primary road link between northern and southern New Brunswick on the eastern side of the province.

A completion date for what was supposed to be an $82-million overhaul of the 1.1-kilometre bridge, announced five years ago, is up in the air after the cancellation of a key contract for this summer.

"This is an important link not only to the citizens of the Miramichi but to the entire province," Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Bill Oliver told a committee of MLAs Thursday afternoon. "It's certainly something that we take seriously."

But he said the estimated cost of this year's phase of the work was going to be more than 40 per cent over expectations.

"It just became an issue that we couldn't afford to move forward on it," he said.

It's the latest snag for the upgrade of the 53-year-old bridge, which provides the fastest way for drivers to get to Fredericton and Moncton in the south and Bathurst, Campbellton and the Acadian Peninsula in the north.

In early 2018 provincial officials said the overall cost of the project had ballooned to more than $100 million. Then-Transportation Minister and Miramichi MLA Bill Fraser said it was the largest project his department had ever taken on.

At the time, Fraser said the bridge would have to fully close for six months this year, from April to November, a major disruption for local and provincial traffic.

Later that year, in the midst of a provincial election campaign, Fraser confirmed that a contract to rehabilitate 12 of the bridge's piers, worth about $17.4 million, had been cancelled.

Miramichi Mayor Adam Lordon said the timeline for completing the work, initially estimated at nine years starting in 2015, has now been thrown off track.

Is a full closure on the horizon?

This summer's work was supposed to be on the deck, or driving surface, of the bridge.

Because the city needs to plan for a possible full closure of the bridge affecting traffic flow and emergency services, "we'd like an update on what their plan is," Lordon said of the province.

Miramichi Bay-Neguac Liberal MLA Lisa Harris said during Thursday's committee meeting that the previous Gallant government had managed to reduce the projected full closure of the bridge to a three-to-four-month period to limit the disruption.

She quizzed Oliver after he said full closure might not be needed for the deck work and that reducing traffic to one lane might be possible.

Departmental engineers had told the Liberal government that a full closure was unavoidable and had to happen soon, she said.

"It was a hard decision to make, but we listened to the experts. We listen to the experts in DTI who told us this absolutely needed to happen," she said.

"I don't know what has changed so drastically. … Were we being duped then when they told us all that, or are we being duped now that they can just put this off?"

Oliver said the department was taking another look at the plan because the safest way to do the work is to close the bridge completely "for a long period of time." He said closing one lane is not safe for workers or drivers.

"We're trying to come up with a reasonable approach that would allow us to go ahead in the safest manner possible," he said.

He told People's Alliance MLA Michelle Conroy that the options are shutting down the bridge for four to five months in each of two construction seasons, or closing it once for about a year, to get the deck work done.

'We want to make sure we do it right'

Oliver said he plans to talk to city officials about what the "tolerance" would be for closures both in Miramichi and for commercial and tourist traffic.

"We want to make sure we do it right, do it once and get on with things," he said.

The possible closure of the bridge has revived calls in Miramichi for the province to build a bypass road north of Miramichi, which would let traffic avoid congestion in the city.

But Oliver said spending $90 million on that project would make no sense to avoid what will be a short-term traffic disruption caused by the bridge closure.

"If it's shut down then no doubt the northern bypass would be very useful," he said. "But once the bridge reopens the majority of that traffic is going to start using the bridge again.

"Do we actually spend that amount of dollars on something that may not be used to the extent it could be in the future?"