Editorial: Fern Hollow Bridge project merits public input

There are times when action has to come before input.

In an emergency, there have to be priorities, and deciding those is never the time for a committee. When you are putting out a fire, you can’t poll the locals on whether the building should be saved. You extinguish the blaze and worry what the neighbors think later.

But the conversations that get put off because of pressing circumstances do still have to happen. Just because a situation started with an emergency doesn’t mean it has to operate on a triage basis for weeks or months after the fire has been put out.

That is the idea behind a lot of the pandemic response criticism and the re-write on emergency powers for the Pennsylvania governor’s office. Today’s emergency declaration doesn’t get to extend perpetually, and people wanted to make sure that was understood.

So now it is time for the city of Pittsburgh to understand that.

When the Fern Hollow Bridge dropped into the gorge below it in January, it was obviously an emergency situation that needed to be addressed with all haste. Save the people. Reroute traffic. Pull out the cars — and that bus. Get started cleaning out the fallen pieces of the old bridge.

Then we come to the next step. Building a replacement for the bridge that carries Forbes Avenue through Frick Park is important and it is absolutely understandable that it should be expedited.

But on Thursday, Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak warned people during a virtual townhall meeting that pubic input and feedback on the project would be limited, saying “the normal procedures, both publicly consultative and legal, that we would normally deploy in a bridge reconstruction or restoration project had to be expedited.”

Mayor Ed Gainey and Gov. Tom Wolf made emergency declarations about the bridge collapse, and that does make changes to a process that normally has a lot of important checkpoints along the way.

Replacing the bridge is a priority because of its role as a key thoroughfare. But the bridge isn’t still in the hollow. The same urgency that made sense in January is not necessary in May.

“This was not an easy decision,” Pawlak said. “Because Fern Hollow collapsed, we had to shorten or eliminate procedures.”

Shorten? Sure. Eliminate? That seems like overkill, especially since the bridge, which fell just hours before President Biden arrived in town to discuss infrastructure, has become a symbol of the need to follow through on maintaining and improving our major frameworks.

The ability of people to voice an opinion on what the government does is the infrastructure of democracy. While majority rule doesn’t work in a crisis, there is definitely time to let people speak on a $25.3 million project months after the collapse. Suggesting otherwise is disingenuous.