Council unanimously approves new LRT plan
July 14th | Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA — A unanimous city council voted for the revised light-rail plan Thursday afternoon, moving ahead with the $2.1-billion plan to run a 12.5-kilometre line between Tunney’s Pasture and Blair Road via a downtown tunnel along Queen Street.

City staff put some meat on the bones of the announcement by Mayor Jim Watson last week that they’d found a way to keep the price tag of the line to $2.1 billion despite four years of inflation, largely by digging a shallower tunnel under downtown, following Queen Street rather than going “cross-country.” City treasurer Marian Simulik assured councillors that if light rail is treated as the city’s No. 1 transportation project, the City of Ottawa has the fiscal capacity to pay for it and numerous other transit improvements until 2048, as far as their projections went.

The presentations had the feel of a victory lap from staffers expecting council’s endorsement — which they got, on a vote of 20-0 (four councillors weren’t at the table to vote: Barrhaven’s Jan Harder, who has been fighting illness, plus Peter Clark, Steve Desroches and Doug Thompson).

Ordinarily, citizens don’t get to make presentations to full city council, but the meeting was structured to allow it this time. Before the 10 a.m. meeting, about a dozen people had signed up to speak. The only substantial criticism of the plan was in the details, from Transport Action representative David Jeanes.

“The devil is in the details and you’ve seen a lot of interesting details today,” he told councillors. He rhymed off a list, from whether to “overbuild” a station at Tunney’s Pasture to serve as a western terminal — but only temporarily, until a planned expansion of the system takes place — to whether the tunnel can be made even shallower under the Rideau Canal by moving a sewer. As it is, there’s a steep grade in the tunnel to get under the canal.

“The cost to do this could be less than the permanent cost of ongoing wear and tear” on brakes and wheels and engines, Jeanes said. “It’s the kind of LRT construction you would wish to avoid.”

Councillors also heard from Cadillac Fairview, the owners of the Rideau Centre, whose vice-president Ivan Boulva said he looked forward to working with the city to make the mall as integral a part of the rail system as it is a part of the current bus system. He hedged on whether the Rideau Centre would contribute financially to the plan or help extend stores into the planned connecting tunnel between the mall and the Rideau station, saying only that he’d be pleased to talk about it further as the plans are refined.

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