THUNDER BAY -- The city has made a rock-solid pledge to rebuild the High Street retaining wall in 2017.
Although no decisions have been made regarding the wall's face, council agreed Wednesday to include $2.3 million in the city's 2017 budget to tear out the High Street retaining wall and rebuild it.
During Wednesday's budget deliberations, city engineering director Kayla Dixon told council the wall has been assessed as the worst structure among all municipal assets.
"Engineering is recommending -- and really, not just recommending. We need to fix this structure this year," Dixon said.
Engineering reports show the wall leaning toward High Street. It details loose, cracked and missing stone and mortar joints in several areas. Exposed joints and gaps are allowing water to flow through the structure, engineers claim, accelerating the wall's deterioration as water freezes and thaws.
"We've been advised from several different professional engineers that the structure has failed," Dixon said.
"Just so people are aware of what that means, the structure itself is a six-foot-thick structure so what you see on the face where the stones have cracked -- the mortar has disappeared and disintegrated -- that has happened throughout the structure."
The city will cover $550,000 of the $2.3-million cost. The rest will be covered through the federal gas tax.
Questions remain over the wall's surface once its reconstruction is complete. A Feb. 3 memorandum to council lists no facing, precast concrete panels, public art, or re-facing the wall with existing stone among options.
Resurfacing the wall with stone, as some residents have proposed would cost $600,000 more than the $2.03-million cost of precast facing. Both would be expected to last a century.
Finishing it with no facing at all would cost $1.7 million and could last 50 years.
After meeting with local engineers the city's engineering department Red River Coun. Brian McKinnon has expressed he will introduce a motion to task administration with direction at council's Mar. 6 meeting.
City manager Norm Gale said administration is willing to clarify positions expressed in the Feb. 3 memo but he's confident in its recommendations.
"We will not provide you with more options for the wall. We will provide you with what we've done to get here, the specific details of why engineering is making their recommendation," Gale said.
