Varcoe: Green Line dream 'not dead yet' as business leaders hold out hope for a compromise

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Bill Black shared a video clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with his colleagues on Friday morning.

In the scene, an ailing man is dropped into a cart full of corpses while insisting he’s not dead yet.

Today, that might be the mantra of Calgary’s Green Line LRT project by some of its most dedicated business supporters, such as Black.

“It’s a therapeutic way to maybe take the edge off of it, and this idea that the Green Line wasn’t dead yet,” the president of the Calgary Construction Association said about the video.

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“And I was sending it out as a bit of a hope message as well for folks.”

Black is certainly hoping death isn’t the fate of Calgary’s long-awaited LRT development after the Green Line was declared DOA by city council on Sept. 17.

Its decision to wind down the project came after the province withdrew its funding for the $6.2-billion project earlier this month.

The amount of money already spent on the proposal and funds needed to wrap up the existing work is staggering, topping $2.1 billion.

Then came news Friday afternoon that Mayor Jyoti Gondek had a productive meeting with Premier Danielle Smith and Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen to discuss work the city has already completed, and how it might fit with the province’s aspirations for a southeast LRT project in Calgary.

“We might have turned a corner,” said Black, whose group represents more than 850 construction companies.

“We had called out the need for saner minds to sit down and set aside politics and salvage a project on Calgarians’ behalf.”

Gondek had sent what she called a “Hail Mary” letter to the province the day before Friday’s session. It wasn’t about saving the reconfigured Green Line, which was slated to run from the city’s downtown to Lynnwood-Millican.

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Instead, it was about salvaging parts of the former proposal and existing contracts in place, along with hundreds of jobs.

“From a business standpoint, this is exactly what we need. We need to see collaboration,” Calgary Chamber of Commerce CEO Deborah Yedlin said Monday.

“I’m more hopeful now than I was last week.”

David Cooper, principal of transportation planning firm Leading Mobility Consulting, believes it’s essential the two sides look to maintain components from the Green Line LRT plan that they generally agree upon, such as the section extending south from Fourth Street S.E. to Shepard.

It’s also critical to retain staff and expertise, given that there are a dozen other major transit projects underway across Canada.

“What happened on Friday was pretty significant, in a positive sense. What you want to do right now is minimize delays and minimize risks,” Cooper said.

“Both the province and the city have probably realized that the public acceptance of spending $2.1 billion — to get nothing — is incredibly damaging. And I think that’s what came to a head last week.”

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Yet, there’s still a long way to go before Calgary’s zombie LRT project is resurrected after nearly a decade of starts and stops.

The Smith government had said the project was too expensive and didn’t get far enough into Calgary’s southeast to serve growing communities.

City officials said they were side-swiped by the province’s letter to withdraw its promised funding, leaving Calgary facing massive financial risks and no ability to keep current activities going.

About 1,000 people worked on the development before layoff notices started going out last week.

So what’s changed?

Perhaps everyone is now looking for a way to save face and not get stuck carrying the blame for the pending financial calamity.

Perhaps it’s an honest move by all sides to find a practical solution.

More importantly, perhaps there’s a reasonable way to prevent people from losing their jobs and taxpayers from needlessly losing money, while getting much-needed rapid transit built.

“The contracts that we think could possibly be salvaged would mean that 600 to 700 people would retain their employment,” Gondek told reporters Friday.

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“I think we’re at a new time where we understand the gravity of the situation and anything is possible moving forward.”

Dreeshen also described Friday as a productive discussion with Calgary’s mayor. There’s an understanding that officials on both sides will sit down and share information, contracts and reports in the coming days.

Provincial officials said Monday another meeting with the premier and mayor will likely take place later this week.

“There was a willingness to work together to make sure that we could hopefully see construction and track finally being laid on the Green Line next year,” Dreeshen said in an interview.

The province has hired an infrastructure project consultancy to examine a different route alignment — ditching the city’s plan for tunnelling downtown — and report back on its analysis by December.

After all of the public battles, Dreeshen said he’s optimistic both sides can work together on a Calgary Green Line project.

“Politics will always be politics, but I think at a working level, my officials and the city officials seem very willing to work together and make sure that this new alignment, come December, is something that will actually work.”

And maybe, just maybe, this megaproject isn’t over quite yet.

“We had kept using the analogy that the body is still warm and projects have been rescued from bigger brinks than this,” Black said.

“It just took a change in mindset.”

Chris Varcoe is a Calgary Herald columnist.

cvarcoe@postmedia.com

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