Alberta’s transportation minister says less-for-more Calgary Green Line due to faults of previous council

Alberta’s Minister of Transportation is giving Calgary’s current city council some grace after the news Phase One of its Green Line LRT was going to be smaller in scale and cost more.

Devin Dreeshen says even though the city has committed another $705 million to build fewer stops along the Green Line, it’s not their fault because the project was doomed from the start.

“The history behind this project has been mired with problems from the get-go, back 10 years,” he said. “I do actually feel sorry for this current council who had to inherit all of these problems from the previous administration of having an un-costed, over-planned Green Line that was essentially going to be 46 kilometres.”

Dreeshen says some aspects of the original Green Line plans were unrealistic, so city officials have had to do a lot of planning and engineering to ensure the project remains feasible.

“It was just unrealistic to go under the Bow River, so this council really had to do the very detailed planning work and engineering to make sure that they could have realistic costs from this,” he said. “Had that all been done day one, 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have seen such a massive reduction in the scope,”

By making amendments such as deferring building a Centre Street Station in the Beltline, cutting six stations, and running the new line from Eau Claire to Lynwood/Millican instead of Eau Claire to Shepard, Dreeshan says council is simply doing their best to pick up the pieces.

Even though the province is showing grace for city officials, they’re not loosening the purse strings any further, and have maintained their original commitment to invest $1.53 billion for the project, and not a dime more.