A total of 2505 people signed Whakatāne Grey Power’s petition asking the Government for a second river crossing in urban Whakatāne, which is now winging its way to Parliament.

Grey Power members Vern Scheffer and Raewyn Kingsley Smith handed pages of signatures to East Coast MP Dana Kirkpatrick at her Whakatāne office on Friday.

They had spent the past two months collecting signatures on the streets of Whakatāne as well as setting up an electronic petition through the New Zealand Parliament Petitions website.

The petition closed on July 25.

“We’ve got 2176 written and 329 electronic,” Mr Scheffer told Ms Kirkpatrick.

He said Grey Power’s biggest concern was the ability to evacuate the town in an emergency because of the Landing Road Bridge causing a bottleneck in traffic.

“We’ve had a couple of incidences already. You can’t get over that bridge. Last time when we had the tsunami warning it was choked.”

There are also concerns about the bridge’s adequacy to cope with traffic levels on a day-to-day basis with increased congestion. With further housing development expected to happen west of the bridge, it is expected that this will get only worse.

“The reality is that the other side of the bridge is developing,” Ms Kingley Smith said. “It’s opening up. There’s more housing going out there, and that bridge is already not functioning.

“If you were in Coastlands and you had a heart attack, you wouldn’t get to hospital in time, even though it’s only a few miles away. You would be on the roadside waiting to get across that bridge.”

Ms Kirkpatrick agreed that now was the time to start pushing for a second bridge.

“In my experience that can take some time, but the sooner you start, the sooner you get there.

“I don’t think anyone disagrees that we need something to happen,” Ms Kirkpatrick said. “Having a petition is a good way to raise people’s awareness. You’ve done a great job.”

She will take the petition to Parliament where, she said, it would be collated and read out in the house. It would then be put before the petition’s committee, which would decide whether it should go to a select committee.

“It’s up to them to make that call,” Ms Kirkpatrick said. “I’m completely in support of this petition. We’ll try and make sure it gets a good hearing.

“I have been to the minister’s office to discuss this issue and have said, ‘it is not okay for all the money to go into the Western Bay area, the Eastern Bay needs some support and some investment in its roading infrastructure as well’.

"It’s always the case with the regions that the further east you get and the further away you get from where the decisions are made, the easier it is to be forgotten. You can rest assured that I have a very loud voice.”

Mayor Victor Luca was also there for the handover of the petition and said the first step toward a new bridge being built was for a business case to be made. This could cost $500,000 to $1 million.

“The business case determines the need, and a lot of the technical and financial issues. It was already on the (Bay of Plenty) Regional Transport Committee’s bid list at number 12.”

Of the list of Bay of Plenty transport projects the committee put forward to central government for funding last year, mostly Western Bay projects received funding.

Dr Luca said it was an issue of equity between Western and Eastern Bay of Plenty.

“The Eastern Bay of Plenty got less than 1 percent of those bids and we account for 16 percent of the population, so there it is in a nutshell,” he said.

He told Grey Power members the committee has written to Transport and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop recently, strongly supporting a request from Whakatāne District Council for a second bridge for Whakatāne.

The letter described a new bridge as a “critical requirement for the region”.

Ms Kirkpatrick said local government elected members needed to fight hard within the regional transport committee to have the bridge higher up the bid list in future funding rounds.