Humps or bumps?

Story: Rick Conroy
New Council begins term by undoing

It was not the way a new council wanted its first official meeting to go. It likely did not want to kick off the new term by overturning the previous Council’s decision. But that is what it did last week. It all came down to humps or bumps.

Earlier this year, Council approved a pilot program to install a series of speed humps to slow traffic in the hamlet. The humps were constructed a couple weeks ago. Immediately, the complaints began to pour into Shire Hall and councillors’ email folders.

“They are too high.” “Poorly located.” “A hazard.” “Impediment to agriculture.”

A list of 800 names were collected in a petition and presented to Council last week. About 20 residents filed into the Highline Hall in Wellington for the meeting on Wednesday evening. Others followed on the livestream.

Lynn Leavitt is an Athol ward farmer and told council he makes a minimum of 25 trips a year loaded with hay through Cherry Valley. He is concerned for his safety. “I will have to come to a stop and roll over the speed bumps,” said Leavitt. “That means a complete stop, then find a gear I can start off with again. I realize they were put there to protect people’s safety, but to me, they have created a bigger hazard,” he said.

But the new Council’s first challenge was to put the matter on the table. Cherry Valley humps weren’t supposed to be on the agenda of the first meeting. Such meetings are mostly housekeeping in nature and used primarily to set the table for the new year.

So it was up to the new Athol councillor Sam Branderhorst, in her first official act, to seek reconsideration of a previous council’s decision. She won the requisite support, and the issue was live.

The debate centred on the definition of a hump versus a bump. Hallowell councillor Brad Nieman said the humps installed were too high; he estimated four or five inches. He said a proper speed hump was much less than that, more like an inch or so. Nieman pressed for the existing bumps to be milled down to a proper ‘hump’ height. “We’ve spent the money,” said Nieman. “Let’s get what we asked for. Get the speed humps and see how the traffic responds. That way ambulances don’t have to slow down. The tractors don’t have to come to a complete stop.”

But it wasn’t clear from the available staff that reshaping existing humps could actually be done in the way Nieman was prescribing.

Inevitably the discussion devolved into laying blame. Councillor Phil Prinzen acknowledged that the bumps were a mistake and took responsibility for the previous Council’s decision. “It was confirmed to me yesterday that maybe this wasn’t the best idea when I went through the Valley, and no word of a lie, the person in front of me drove around them on the sidewalk,” explained Prinzen. “So would you rather have someone going 50, or running over the guy on the bike on the sidewalk? To the taxpayer, sorry for wasting money. We will do better,” he said.

But neither Nieman nor Phil St-Jean—both members of the previous Council—believed it was their fault. They insisted that they wanted humps—and instead got bumps.

It wasn’t moving the conversation closer to a resolution.

Nieman sought to defer the matter to a later meeting to see if there was a remedy. Others were concerned about ripping up the newly constructed humps without comment or opinion from municipal staff. No one was happy to see the new Council tripped up over speed humps.

Ultimately there wasn’t enough support to prolong the decision; most just wanted to “rip off the bandaid.”

And so it was that Council, in its first decision of this new term, directed staff to remove brand new speed bumps in Cherry Valley.

The humps (or bumps?) were removed on Monday.