Plans for the reopening of the Boggo Road prison have become more uncertain as the Cross River Rail project faces stiff competition for funding.
The Cross River Rail, which was deferred for two years after January's floods, is a nine-kilometre rail link from Salisbury to Bowen Hills, including five kilometres of underground rail. There will also be an underground station on the Boggo Road reserve. The project is still at feasibility planning stage and further work was dependant upon available funding, hopefully from Infrastructure Australia, but the CCR now faces serious competition for that source of funding from other projects.
How does this affect the prison? Well, first of all, the government are looking for someone to come in and develop land next to the old prison, probably for retail/residential use. Part of the deal is that the developer comes up with a plan for 'reusing' the prison, which will mostly remain a historical/cultural site. So the reopening of the prison is linked to the successful development of the land next door.
The problem has been that the land next door will have an underground train station built there. The station will have two entry/exit points (black dots, above). The black dot to the left in this image is in the centre of the land that will be developed (see full map here). Obviously, a developer needs to know the what-when-how-and-where of this station before they can commit millions to their own plans.
This was quite straightforward last year, but when the CCR project was suspended after the January floods everything was thrown in the air. Feasibility planning for the CCR has continued, but would only proceed beyond this stage once funding was available. Melbourne's very similar Metro 1 project, however, is further advanced in the planning process which may make it more likely to attract Infrastructure Australia funding, ahead of the CCR.
All this adds further uncertainty to the future of the CCR, which in turn directly affects plans to develop the Boggo Road Urban Village and of course reopen the prison. In our most recent talks with Public Works, it was suggested to us that if there are significant delays in the CCR project come 2013, the state government and the developer could commit funds to open the old prison early. That remains to be seen of course, but a further problem is that there is a state election due in the next 12 months, and a change of government may well mean a big change in funding plans for Boggo Road, for better or for worse.
As it is, our best guess is still that the prison should reopen in 2013 at the earliest. Nothing, however, is written in stone yet.
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