Parking headaches vex QEII development

The problem currently vexing bureaucrats charged with planning the biggest, most advanced hospital yet contemplated in Atlantic Canada is where to park the damn cars. Once the QEII redevelopment is complete — construction will take about five years starting in 2021 — an oversized city block in central Halifax will be fully occupied by hospital and research facilities, most of which will be brand new and ultra-modern. The size of the QEII “new generation” project comes into focus once you know that the structures to be built around the existing Halifax Infirmary — already Nova Scotia’s largest hospital — are almost twice its size. The Infirmary is an 800,000-squarefoot hospital and the new buildings will add about 1.5 million square feet. That’s a whole lot of hospital. The public officials working full-time to get this project ready to go out for proposals had enough to worry about before parking became a headache. As project lead John O’Connor, an engineer with more than 38 years of public service, explained to the Nova Scotia legislature’s public accounts committee this week, the existing parkade that serves the Infirmary has to come down to make way for the new construction. Specifically, the new cancer care centre is planned for that space. Moving the province’s primary cancer treatment centre to the Infirmary site wasn’t part of the original plan, but Cancer Care Nova Scotia made a compelling and winning case that it should be in the new complex rather than a kilometre away at the old Victoria General site, where it is today. It’s hard enough to find a single parking spot in Halifax, but O’Connor and company need about 800 of them before construction can begin next summer. The site selected for the new parkade is across the street from the Infirmary, next to Nova Scotia’s Museum of Natural History, and that’s a problem for a bunch of folks and a lot of reasons. The big new garage will loom over the storied Wanderers Grounds, home of the young and popular Halifax Wanderers FC. The soccer — or football, if you prefer — club says the parkade will limit its potential to grow future spectator capacity. The parkade also encroaches on the paddock of a much older Halifax institution, the Bengal Lancers. The province says it will find a way to minimize impact on the Lancers and will try to maintain the size of their paddock. But there’s more. While the parkade covers an existing parking lot, it needs a tad more room, so a half-acre chunk of green space owned by Halifax Regional Municipality also figures in the mix. It’s not quite paradise, but HRM Coun. Waye Mason, among others, isn’t keen on seeing it paved to put up a parking lot. Available land around the Infirmary site is virtually nonexistent. The site is bordered by residential properties, the Halifax Commons and an historic cemetery. The province’s options are clearly limited. People come from all over Nova Scotia, and beyond, for treatment at the Infirmary. It’s also Halifax’s hospital. At the risk of repetition, the existing hospital needs parking during construction of the new facilities and, once completed, the larger complex will need lots more parking spaces. O’Connor told the committee that 2,700 spaces are required to serve the new complex. They’re putting 1,000 underground, beneath the new buildings and that’s no small feat, given high water tables and the fact that peninsular Halifax is built on rock. There’s about 500 existing spaces between the Abby Lane and Camp Hill Veterans buildings, so even with the new 800-space parkade, they’re 400 short. Buy land, Mark Twain famously said, they’re not making it anymore. It seems like, within that limitation, the province’s project team is doing the best it can. A build of this magnitude is going to disrupt the lives of those around it. Should the province do everything it can to keep those affected informed and, where possible, accommodated? Absolutely. At the committee, senior government officials committed to doing just that. They, and the private sector partner that’s selected to design, build, finance and maintain the new hospital and research facilities will be held to that promise. The QEII redevelopment is the largest infrastructure project in Nova Scotian history, and most of it’s happening in the middle of Halifax. At a minimum, the construction will be inconvenient. That, and a couple of billion dollars, is the price of new state-ofthe-art medical facilities. Jim Vibert, a journalist and writer for longer than he cares to admit, consulted or worked for five Nova Scotia governments. He now keeps a close and critical eye on those in power.