Johnson Street Bridge Heritage

The City has posted some decent documents about the whole bridge issue on their site.   The City is making available some documents relating to the heritage values of the bridge.

Among this is the Heritage Assessment of the Johnson Street Bridge by Commonwealth Historic Resource Management.

From that document:

Overall Value

The Johnson Street Bridge has very high heritage value in the context of Victoria, the Inner Harbour, and the City’s and Region’s transportation systems.

The Bridge has high heritage value as an engineering landmark designed by one of North America’s most renowned bridge engineers / engineering firms.

Another document is Johnson Street Bridge Heritage Assessment by Jonathan Yardley which also highlights the heritage value of the bridge.

I am curious what sort of weight council will give to these reports in their decision making?  Certainly there is significant weight behind the importance of the heritage values and why it should be retained.   This gives council the space to back away from the new bridge without losing face.

One significant reason council may wish to go for the refurbishment option is that they have enough people that signed the petition to win a referendum to borrow the money.   There is also a large body of volunteers available to campaign for that option.   There is a very high danger that choosing the new bridge option will lead to a defeat of the referendum in the fall.