Winding down of Green Line LRT project 'unfortunate': transportation minister

Alberta's transportation minister says the City of Calgary's decision to wind down the Green Line LRT project is "unfortunate” — but he isn’t completely closing the door on the transit initiative.

City council voted 10-5 to stop the project on Tuesday. There were several attempts to save the $6.2 billion project and instead put it on pause, but in the end council members decided to bring it to a close.

That will happen at a cost of at least $2.1 billion.

“It is unfortunate that some members of city council would prefer to see the Green Line cancelled entirely rather than find a far more cost-effective and longer above-ground alignment that will actually reach hundreds of thousands of Calgarians in the southeast of the city," Dreeshen said in a statement Wednesday.

The province pulled its funding while it reviews the alignment of the LRT line.

A final report on the line is expected in December, and Dreeshen says the ball is in the municipality’s hands after that.

“We’ve actually now hired AECOM to go do that work, and by December we’ll have this new stretched-out alignment going down to the southeast,” he told CTV News. “From there, we’ll share it with council and Calgarians to see if they support it.”

Gondek said Tuesday the province's decision pulled "the pin on the Green Line as we know it."

She said with any new alignment proposals from the province, there will need to be new design work, procurement and funding agreements.

"There is an order of government that needs to take responsibility for their action, and there's another order of government, which is ours, that needs to do the right thing, which is to wind this project down — although it's not what any of us wanted to do," she said.

The province prefers a train line down to Seton with no tunnelling downtown.

“So today, right now, it would be great if their Green Line folks work with AECOM to share any information, any detail, designs or engineer planning that they’ve done,” Dreeshen said.

In July, Calgary councillors approved an updated plan for the first phase of the Green Line, which was shorter and costlier than originally proposed.

Phase 1 of the project was originally tagged at $5.5 billion for an 18-kilometre stretch from Eau Claire to Shepard in the Southeast.

However, due to delays and escalating costs, the project was instead tweaked to run from Eau Claire to Lynnwood/Millican for $6.248 billion.

The updated scope for Phase 1 meant there would be five fewer stations in the southeast, and that the Centre Street station would be deferred.

Speaking at an unrelated press conference Wednesday, Premier Danielle Smith said the money pledged for the Green Line project is still there, but the province wants it to be as it was "initially pitched."

"What we kept observing, and we kept on having the conversation with the city as they got more and more budget constraints was, ‘don’t cut the south part of the line, cut some of the expensive downtown part of the line,’" Smith said.

With files from The Canadian Press