Brutal optics on buried RHVP report

Whether public was endangered is ‘grey zone,’ says senior city staffer

Late Wednesday night, after councillors had learned that a report on the slipperiness of the Red Hill parkway had been withheld from them and the public for more than four years, the city’s general manager of public works balked at describing the document as having been “suppressed.”

“I don’t know if I would use that word; we know it was never provided to council,” Dan McKinnon, standing shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Fred Eisenberger, told reporters.

Asked who among his staff hadn’t “provided the report,” McKinnon said he didn’t know.

But in the cold light of the next day, McKinnon revealed the consultants report had been commissioned in 2013 and apparently sat on since 2014 by Gary Moore, the city’s former director of engineering.

The study, which McKinnon says cost about $30,000, revealed that while the testing standards for low skid resistance on the Red Hill didn’t breach minimum standards, they were low enough to warrant further investigation.

That, combined with an increase in collisions on the Red Hill, sparked councillors to immediately approve reducing the speed on a targeted section of the road, bump up police speed enforcement, and to launch an investigation into why and how the report had been kept from them.

Additionally, council moved up the planned resurfacing of the entire parkway to this June.

According to McKinnon, initial questioning has found nobody other than Moore who was aware of the study.

But at this point he can’t say for sure whether it was shared with anybody else.

Moore retired from the city in May of last year. In June he went to work on contract as the senior technical lead for Hamilton’s LRT project. Prior to his retirement, he’d been director of engineering for about a decade.

Both the Red Hill and Lincoln Alexander parkways were Moore’s babies. He was the city’s lead engineer on the design and construction of both roadways.

Moore could not be reached for comment but the city’s audit services have reportedly done an initial interview with him. More will likely follow. Other staff will also be interviewed.

It was Moore’s successor, Gord McGuire, who found the report while rummaging through electronic file cabinets. That was in late September. Why wasn’t council informed until this Wednesday?

Though the discovery was quickly shared with the staff leaders, McKinnon says council wasn’t notified immediately because staff wanted to have answers to the questions they knew they’d be asked.

The municipal election also complicated things.

On Monday of this week, the city received a consultants’ memo responding to questions about the safety of the RHVP raised by the shrouded study.

The external experts recommend keeping the parkway open, noting that repaving the surface to make it consistent with the Linc will address concerns.

It remains to be seen if McKinnon will eventually come around to accepting the word “suppressed” to describe the withholding of the report.

But obviously that’s what happened, though why it wasn’t brought to light is another matter. Was it negligence? Forgetfulness? Professional hubris? Who can say?

There’s no question revelations such as this can only shake the public’s confidence and trust in city staff. The optics are brutal. But whether the driving public was endangered by the report being buried is a “grey zone,” says McKinnon.

After all, in response to a high number of accidents over the years, the city has taken many steps to improve safety on the road, including extra signage, reflective markers and periodic speed enforcement blitzes.

“My belief is if you drive the limit and drive for conditions and you’re paying attention, you should have no concerns about your safety on that highway today,” McKinnon said.

But he also notes that the “forgiveness” for driving over the speed limit that’s engineered into all roads is a “little bit less” on the Red Hill because of the lower friction or grip when rubber meets road.