Deadlines loom for cycle bridge plans
The future of Palmerston North’s cycle and pedestrian bridge proposal could depend on councillors signing off a detailed business case on Monday.
If not approved, the timetable of targets to be reached could be in jeopardy.
The bridge project will also need to get through resource consent processes without anyone appealing to the Environment Court.
The $7.4 million project is on a tight timeframe because a condition for securing taxpayer money is that the bridge should be built by the end of June 2018.
He Ara Kotahi project steering group chairman Ray Swadel said the deadline could be met.
But it would need councillors’ endorsement to proceed at Monday’s planning and policy committee meeting, and it would need consents in place, and not appealed, by the middle of 2017.
His report to the committee acknowledged that getting consents approved on time was a key risk to the project.
‘‘The programme is extremely tight,’’ he said.
Assuming councillor support, two months had been allowed to prepare and submit consent applications, and six months for the consents process.
The group’s preferred location and design for the bridge was unveiled at a public meeting on July 13.
It was for a 190 metre long bridge with a 4.2m wide deck inspired by a karaka tree, its roots on the Massey side of the Manawatu River, and its ‘‘canopy’’ falling opposite the end of Ruha St by the Holiday Park.
Massey University had put aside earlier reluctance to allow a direct link across its farmland to the Crown Research Institutes.
Swadel said that change meant about 1140 people a day could be expected to use the link, up from 1040 originally estimated. The plan will be challenged. Ruha St resident Greg Fry has a petition signed by 14 neighbours opposing a Dittmer Drive location for the bridge, and asking for it to be built near Maxwells Line.
Katene St resident Lesley Cranfield said the Ruha St site had only been raised at the end of a public meeting called to discuss three options further downstream, and she was worried about the lack of consultation.
Swadel said it was clear members of the community felt they were not being listened to.
He said formal consultation processes were still to come.