Stop The Kettle Island Bridge

Volunteers needed to circulate petitions

Two formal petitions have been prepared to protest the Kettle Island recommendation:  a provincial petition supported by MPP Madeleine Meilleur, and a federal petition supported by MP Mauril Belanger.  Once a sufficient number of signatures has been collected, these will be formally presented to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and to the Federal House of Commons.

Your help is needed to participate in a door-to-door campaign to collect signatures. We need as many signatures from as many communities as possible.  This is your chance to make a difference.

If you are willing to help, please contact Ron Cairns at rcairns191@rogers.com

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Your top priority: Submit your comments

The strong showing at the Final Public Consultation was a fantastic start to the public rally against the Kettle Island bridge. But this will be a long fight, and the energy and enthusiasm displayed at that meeting will need to be sustained and amplified as we continue our campaign.

For now, your top priority should be to formally submit your comments to the consultants. Each and every one of your comments will become part of the public record for the project, and the more comments that are submitted, the more the consultants and the project sponsors will listen.

The submission deadline is October 10th.

An equally important action on your part is to send messages to your elected representatives and the decision makers for this project. Just copy your submission to the consultants and paste it into a message, or take a look at our Letter to Decision Makers for ideas on what to say. Click here for the contact list.

We’ve also had a request from CARAD (Community Action for Reasonable Analyses and Decisions), a coalition representing 15 impacted communities, to encourage you to send a copy of your feedback and comments to Jane Brammer, CARAD chair, at janebrammer@hotmail.com. CARAD will compile and present your feedback in a media event.

Please feel free to use any content from this website when writing your comments. Your comments don’t need to be long, but it is essential that your concerns are formally logged by the project. I also encourage you to publish your feedback on stopthebridge.org as a comment to this post. Others will benefit from seeing what you’ve written, and you’ll be published for the world to see.

A few highlights that you may want to cover include:

• This study puts trucks before people
• Community interests were not represented on the weightings committee
• The weightings exercise was not transparent
• Traffic and cost factors were weighted disproportionally high, while community and people factors were weighted disproportionally low
• The recommendation does not solve the problem of trucks on King Edward
• There are no factors that directly consider the negative impact of increased traffic on residential roads
• Health and safety issues associated with the transportation of hazardous goods and diesel fuel exhaust are not adequately addressed

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Lansdowne Video is here!

If you witnessed the madness and mayhem at Lansdowne for the Final Public Consultation on Sept 24, we’re sure you’d agree that folks in Ottawa are ready for a fight. More than 1000 people showed up, and they were mad as hell.

If you missed it, here are some of the video highlights.

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Sept 30th, 2008 – Last Day for Transportation Master Plan Comments

Important Message from Councillor Jacques Legendre:

———
Dear Residents,

The City is currently conducting a mandatory revision of its Transportation Master Plan. The draft revision focuses mainly on Mass Transit although some proposals for new or widened road corridors are included.

One disappointing aspect is the absence of any mention of studying an Ottawa By-Pass (Ring Road). The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario has included such a study in its vision of “Future Highway Expansion” needs for the province.

As you all know, the Ring Road Concept is a key element for the removal of unwanted trucks from our communities. Tuesday, September 30th, is the last day to submit comments to staff on your vision of what this next Transportation Master Plan should look like.

It would be very important, if you can, to request to City Staff that the notion/study of a Ring Road be included in this plan. As things currently stand, the ring road is absent from the City’s future plans. It is time to incorporate this ring road concept and your help in accomplishing this would be very welcomed.

You can do so online at https://ottawa.ca/cgi-bin/form.cgi?dir=beyond_2020&form=feedback_tmp_en

or by email at plan@ottawa.ca

Sincerely,

Jacques Legendre
———

For a map of the proposed roadway transportation plan within the report, click here.  Note that there is no current provision for a Ring Road in this plan, although bridge crossing options east of Kettle Island would connect well to a future ring road via the new arterial road proposed between Hunt Club and Innes.

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Strong turnout at the Final Public Consultation

More than 1000 concerned citizens packed the meeting room at Lansdowne for the Final Public Consultation.  It was a great display of community energy.  Photos, videos, and commentary to follow…stay tuned.

We’ll be revamping the website to better accomodate the media attention that this story is sure to attract, but for now, here is a link to the Sept 25 Ottawa Citizen article:  “Hundreds of angry residents tell consultants ‘no’ to proposed bridge at Kettle Island“.

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Your Participation is Critical!

KETTLE ISLAND HAS BEEN SELECTED AS THE PREFERRED CROSSING ALTERNATIVE!

Make no mistake – unless we mobilize our communities and make it known in a loud voice to our politicians, the media, and the consultants that this is a flawed selection with massive detrimental impacts on thousands of people, this bridge will be built.

If we don’t stop this now, the next two years will be dedicated to refining and designing the Kettle Island corridor and crossing. The 4-year construction project could conceivably begin in 2010, and the new trucking route could be fully functional by as early as 2014.

It is absolutely critical that you do the following to prevent this from happening:

• Formally submit your comments to the consultants
• Contact your elected representatives and the decision-makers in this project to tell them how you feel about this issue
• Raise as much awareness any way that you can (elevator pitches, talking to your neighbours, community rallies, letters to the editor, blog participation, etc.)
• Convince everyone you can to do the same

We need massive community involvement, action, and support. Together, we can stop this.

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