Province will help fund Green Line if city will ‘change its mind’: Dreeshen
Article content
In response to Calgary city council’s decision Tuesday to wind down work on the Green Line project, Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen said the provincial government’s funding contribution for the multibillion-dollar transit initiative remains on the table — but only if the city opts to “change its mind and decide to build a Green Line that serves the needs of Calgary commuters.”
Dreeshen said the province’s contribution to the Green Line has never been a blank cheque, and called the truncated alignment approved by council on July 30 an “irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars.”
“The province promised funding for a line servicing hundreds of thousands of Calgarians in southeast Calgary, not a stub line barely reaching out of downtown,” Dreeshen wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
“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.”
His comments come after council voted 10-5 on Tuesday evening to wind down work on the project and look at ways to transfer management of the Green Line over to the province. The vote landed at the end of a day-long meeting where municipal officials stressed the city’s vision for the Green Line was not feasible without provincial backing.
Councillors who voted in opposition to the motion included Dan McLean, Sean Chu, Evan Spencer, Sonya Sharp and Andre Chabot. Through a slate of failed amendments and alternate recommendations on Tuesday, they argued the city should try to salvage some sort of middle ground with the province and continue trying to deliver a revised Green Line.
In a presentation Tuesday, Green Line project CEO Darshpreet Bhatti told council that it would cost at least $850 million to wind down work, noting the project has employed more than 1,000 people, including 800 contractors.
With more than $1.3 billion spent on the Green Line to date, the wind-down costs would increase the total price tag to over $2.1 billion, despite not a single kilometre of track being laid.
City officials said they would seek to be “made whole” by the province for those costs, but Dreeshen said he doesn’t see “why Alberta taxpayers should be asked to pay for decade-long mismanagements and decisions” made by past mayors and city councils.
“Further, the city is more than welcome to proceed with the project without provincial funding should they insist that the cost of the wind-down exceeds the committed provincial contribution,” he wrote.
In her own response to Tuesday’s verdict, Mayor Jyoti Gondek said that it was “an incredibly sad day,” adding the vote was spurred by Dreeshen’s previous correspondence on Sept. 3 that stated the province would pull its funding contribution of $1.53 billion.
In that letter, Dreeshen criticized the Green Line’s multiple budget escalations and said the province would hire an engineering firm to review a new, above-ground alignment that can stretch the train further south.
“This project has suffered a terrible blow because of a decision of the Government of Alberta,” Gondek said in a video posted to X. “We’re left as a city to bear all of the responsibility for the contracts that are in place and we hold all of the liability.”
Gondek called the verdict “devastating” to the employees who will lose their jobs, as well as for Calgarians who purchased homes in neighbourhoods where Green Line stations were promised to be built.
