With Green Line demands, Danielle Smith and UCP become urban transit planners
Calgary wants province to take on struggling LRT project. That could suit premier’s own designs
There appeared to be a sense of frustration and resignation as Mayor Jyoti Gondek expressed interest this week in thrusting control of the Green Line into the provincial government's hands.
If Premier Danielle Smith's UCP insists on re-engineering the line's route in the way it prefers — after rescinding its approval for the city's recently downsized Green Line plans — it may as well deliver it entirely and cover any cost overruns that further delay creates, the mayor reasoned.
"They have an alignment that they wish to deliver, they need to take on the risk on this," Gondek told reporters at city hall.
That could suit the Smith government's wishes rather nicely.
The provincial government has already legislated for itself more say over how local councils deal with Ottawa, organize their elections and pass bylaws that don't jibe with provincial policy. Taking over planning for local transit could be next on the horizon.
Traditionally, a province plays the quiet and supportive (if not scrutiny-applying) funding partner in urban projects that are planned and built by Calgary or other city halls. Ottawa does the same — expressing a broad interest in the economic and public benefits of more rail transit, but not assuming the role of chief engineer or designer.
That's been the way it's mostly been for nine years of work on the Green Line, each higher level putting in $1.53-billion toward what's now a $6.2-billion project. Four years ago, the Jason Kenney-led Alberta government demanded a pause to review and tinker with plans, but after those reconsiderations the project largely proceeded according to city hall's preferences.
That's not what happened this week, in the aftermath of an inflation-strained budget and decisions to cut six stations from the project's first phase.
Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen, despite expressing support for that Green Line phase a month ago, drafted a letter branding the city's shortened Green Line an emerging "boondoggle" that serves too few Calgarians and communities. He declared the existing alignment dead as far as the province was concerned; it would commission its own plans with a new way of getting downtown and which stretched farther south — and that would be the new Green Line.
In an interview Wednesday on CBC Radio's The Homestretch, Dreeshen took special aim at the downtown tunnel to Eau Claire that's been central to the city's LRT plans for at least a half-decade.
"We'd love to see it go down to the South Health Campus, obviously to stretch it as far as possible," Dreeshen said. "And to have an above-ground solution downtown, so we don't have water issues [that] will inevitably come if we were to start digging downtown stations underground in Calgary."
The Kenney government, which Dreeshen served in cabinet, had reviewed and signed off on that tunnel plan. It may attract new scrutiny as the most expensive section of a budget-busting project that no longer extends to as many southeast neighbourhoods.
The minister's rhetoric echoes that of a citizens' lobby group led by Jim Gray, which has long stood firmly against a train tunnel downtown.
The city has analyzed various downtown LRT alternatives over the years and the Second Street S.W. tunnel was the one that maximized ridership and provided the best connection to the future Centre Street N. extension.
But the Smith government expressed a desire to get into the railway-building business this spring, launching a project to develop a rail master plan for Alberta. It would weave in various wish-list projects like a Calgary-Banff passenger train, and high-speed rail between Edmonton and Calgary.
The province had already embedded into the Green Line plans what Dreeshen calls a "Grand Central Station," tying together the LRT system and these intercity proposals. Smith has also spoken of copying Ontario's Metrolinx agency that's building and managing a slew of Toronto-region projects, including that city's Eglinton Crosstown LRT.
Gondek has stated the city, with its lesser financial capacity, cannot afford the Green Line with its new delays. But the province can, and Dreeshen hasn't ruled out doing so, in conjunction with the government's new design ambitions.
According to a senior government source, Premier Smith's inner circle has taken new interest in mostly elevated trains like Vancouver's Skytrain or Montreal's Réseau express métropolitain to off-island suburbs, especially as alternatives to going underground. (Both systems rely on tunnels in much of their cities' downtown cores.)
Jim Gray's group has pitched a Green Line route that ends at an elevated station on Third Street S.E. by the back end of city hall. It touts that option as cheaper than tunneling.
City officials have said they've considered it, but express concern that dropping off passengers five blocks east of the proposed Green Line route would add too much extra pressure on the existing Seventh Avenue Blue and Red lines to ferry people to and from the rest of the core.
This could make the Seventh Avenue corridor so overcrowded the city would need to fast-track its long-term plans to build a tunnel under Stephen Avenue for the Red Line, Michael Thompson told council this week.
In other words, the anti-tunnel lobby's LRT vision could necessitate a different train tunnel through downtown.
Also, an LRT line that ended in the East Village would still have to snake back west to connect north across the river at Centre Street, somehow traversing part of the core and Eau Claire with a ribbon of elevated pillars.
However, that alignment option from Gray's group wasn't thoroughly studied in past reports, at least not the ones made public. Perhaps a new set of eyes, one that Dreeshen selects, would view a downtown (or downtown-adjacent) elevated train with more enthusiasm.
The minister has expressed confidence Alberta can build the Green Line he fancies for the same amount or less than the stubbier initial phase the city had planned. But it could wind up that, rather than supporting a city project that Alberta Transportation is now dead set against, the province would demand to build a project city planners have long been dead set against.
This would all, of course, also have to hinge on what the federal government thinks of the province's new designs, and whether it still merits Ottawa's $1.53-billion share.
If politics are part of the Smith government's new resistance to what Gondek wants, who's to say the Trudeau Liberals won't have political elbows of their own?
Whether or not the province winds up in full financial control of Calgary's next LRT line, it has demanded full design control. And yet, it's a project that city hall will have to live with and wholly integrate into the city's existing transit network.
And yet, the mayor doesn't believe her city can afford to build it anymore. And yet, there are 1,000 employees on the Green Line project, and $1.3 billion already invested, and low-floor trains ordered, and buildings along the route being demolished this week.
There will be more "and yets" to come in this long-running drama's latest twists, as Dreeshen and Smith commission their new blueprints. Who knows when southeast Calgarians will actually have any trains to ride?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
