A new gate is coming to the top of Cowan Road with the intent to stop traffic from coming down the road as a short-cut from the golf course. The road, and its potentially increased maintenance will be added to the Five Year Capital Road Plan to be brought to council in 2018. A number of the people who live on the road came to council this week to express their outrage at the conditions they see on the road every day, and during the winter months in particular. Members of this group say they left council disappointed with the action taken in response to their complaints.
“If they paved that entire road properly, we would be fine with them opening the gate entirely - I think most of my neighbours would agree with that,” says Steve Livaja, who has lived at the top of the road for 18 years. “It feels like the municipality is ignoring this issue, and I don’t understand why. There is a level of frustration with this I have not seen before. Last winter was a real wake-up call and it has really brought the neighbours together.”
Livaja says there has been a gate at the top of the hill for as long as he’s lived there, and it used to be opened during the winter to allow a plow to come down the road.
“Over time people built paths for vehicles around the gate until the Muni dug a big hole beside the gate to prevent that. Then people started damaging the gate,” says Livaja. “The road was in fairly good condition until construction vehicles used it as a shortcut and chewed it up significantly.”
Resident Robert Lewis explained to council that before Bowen became a municipality, if there was a problem on the road you just had to make a phone call and someone would come and fix it, and while snow-plowing was not done frequently it did get done.
“We’ve gotten to the point now, in the past number of years, where the maintenance on the road is like some third world country,” said Lewis. “There’ll be four holes and two will be filled. Someone will come, throw the stuff on, stamp on it. It doesn’t work.”
The Bishop’s Hill residents speaking at Council mention fractures again and again, alongside stories of near car accidents and a pregnant woman falling while traversing from one house to the next. Livaja says he shattered his wrist in two places after a fall on the road in 2009, and required two surgeries to repair it.
“Last winter, everyone living on Bishop’s Hill got in on the deal and started shovelling the road ourselves,” says Livaja. “I spoke with one of the plowing contractors and he said he’d be willing to do our road, but wasn’t allowed to.”
Bob Robinson, Manager of Public Works at the Municipality explained the situation from his perspective and elaborated on his report to council, asking for permission to install a new gate at the top of the hill.
He explained that in his view, it seemed to be a game for kids to find ways to break and open the gate, but that this vandalism shouldn’t be a problem any more because, hopefully these kids have grown up and left the island.
He added that part of the problem with the road is that if it’s salted too much, the road’s moisture content increases and the work done to fill in pot-holes gets destroyed. He also explained that the road is considered “tertiary,” meaning that the plows are instructed to clear the roads where the buses go first, and then move on to the “secondary roads.”
“If it snows in between that system, then we start all over again from the very front. So when I say I can’t guarantee the road is going to be plowed, last year was an anomaly, we barely got to plowing anything other than our main roads. Cowan Road was not an anomaly.”
Councillor Maureen Nicholson asked Robinson how decisions were made about plowing the tertiary roads, should the opportunity come up. Robinson responded that only two trucks were available for those tertiary roads, and his crew would start either on the East side or West side of the Island.
“The less scary of the roads, the guys like to do them first,” he said. “Going down Bishop’s Hill there are some people who just don’t feel comfortable going there. And it’s really hard to plow going uphill.”
While Councillor Gary Ander noted that the bottom of Adams Road was also treacherous and un-passable due to snowfall last winter, he stated the importance of finding some way to make Bishop’s Hill safer.
“When we have that many people getting injured, there has to be some kind of response,” he said. “And I think if we are looking at tertiary roads to plow or do some work on, we have to look at the safety issue as a top priority.”
Councillor Michael Kaile echoed Ander’s call to address the road’s safety.
“This is a municipal road,” said Kaile. “And I’m sorry, but the issues stated are a matter of record. And it’s our responsibility to make sure you do something about it and that’s inescapable. There’s no short-cut here. I don’t know what kind of professional help you need to make sure it gets done but, there’s no ducking this one.”
Mayor Murray Skeels compared Bishop’s Hill do David Road, where he used to live.
“If you want to fall down and die, live on the road I lived on,” he said. “So as far as people slipping and falling on steep roads on Bowen Island, that unfortunately is a horrible fact of life.”
Skeels did acknowledge that the level of maintenance that previously existed on the road needed to come back, but also said that residents need to do their part by ensuring an excess of water does not flow from the driveways onto the road.
Municipal CAO Kathy Lalonde said that Bishop’s Hill has been an ongoing problem for the municipality since the time of incorporation, and suggested a special tax structure to “meet the needs of a few.”
Livaja says there he and his neighbours will continue to push to have better care taken of their road.
“My concern is that it is only a matter of time before serious injury leads someone to hire a lawyer, forcing us to put our tax dollars towards defending a lawsuit against the municipality.”
