Leong: Alberta’s Green Line ultimatum and Calgary’s impossible choice

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After days of being hounded about secrecy over plans to make over the Green Line LRT project, the Alberta government finally relented, sort of.

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Officials last week unleashed a 165-page tome authored by AECOM containing its recommendations about how the Green Line should approach and cross downtown Calgary.

And most unusual for a report of this nature, it ended up raising more questions than it answered.

The only thing anyone can say with certainty is that AECOM reaffirms the Green Line’s usefulness as a transportation option for southeast Calgary.

It also lacks any underground options, cast aside by the province from the outset.

Some of the missing information lives on blank pages, redacted by the Alberta government to remove what it considered commercially sensitive information that could affect bidding.

Also unknown is the estimated price of the new route, which the province said would end at 7th Avenue.

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The only thing that came close was a comment from Premier Danielle Smith, who suggested building the entire Green Line would cost $20 billion.

She also said deleting the approximately 600-metre-long segment from 7th Avenue to Eau Claire would save some $400 million.

There is nothing obviously visible in the report to back up her assertions — and this last piece of trivia is yet another mystery on top of everything else, as the assumptions and conclusions in the AECOM report are based on the existence of a stop in Eau Claire.

We’re being asked to take the province on faith. This is an unreasonable request to make: No government anywhere should be afforded this type of deference.

Besides, many of us (including me) made this mistake earlier by giving Alberta the benefit of the doubt and blindly accepting the idea of elevated light rail being less expensive than tunnelling. However, the province may have found a way to flip that expectation on its head.

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The AECOM report doesn’t address or include all the costs of additional work to accommodate the Green Line being built above ground, the City of Calgary said last week, meaning the final price tag could rival or exceed that of putting the line underground.

Of course, we shouldn’t take the city’s word for it, either. Only an uncensored, more complete report will answer any lingering questions.

AECOM itself said a number of concerns had to be omitted from its work due to lack of time and resources.

These include and are not limited to flooding and stormwater impacts; noise and vibration mitigation; property access; socioeconomic and property value impacts; traffic modelling; or impacts to the transit system’s underlying service levels.

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More than once, the report explicitly flagged issues that would need further study. It’s implied these could cost money to fix.

Separately, the Alberta government had said it wouldn’t cover any potential overruns for its version of the Green Line. How convenient for the province to take control, impose its vision and then say it won’t pay for potential omissions and errors in its planning. Talk about bad faith.

Despite the lack of thorough provincial homework, the city is being told to quickly decide whether to carry on, given a looming federal deadline for infrastructure funds. (Never mind the fact Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are imploding and hanging on by a thread.)

And what a choice Calgary faces: walk away from the Green Line — again — sunk costs and all, or face a bill of unknown size to build the project to the province’s not fully defined specifications.

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The Alberta government pulled out of the previous version of the Green Line because it said it could do it at a lower cost and save taxpayers money.

If this incomplete provincially commissioned AECOM report is the final word on the matter, then Alberta has failed abjectly to prove its case.

Rather than being constructive, the province’s only accomplishment is causing yet another costly delay, forcing a lower order of government into a game of chicken in which Calgary taxpayers lose — no matter the outcome.

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