Ward 13’s Dan McLean Breaks Down Green Line Challenges
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
204.3386
Summary
In this week's episode, we are joined by Mayor Naheed Nenshi to talk about the Green Line, the City of Calgary's $1.5B+ tunnel project, and the ongoing battle with the feds over funding for the project.
Transcript
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you know the news isn't that big but this year has been different uh i i want to start with i
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guess the green line that came out a report we're kind of waiting a long time it was kind of as
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people expected and for people not familiar with it who are watching from outside of calgary this
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is an extension of the light rail transit system the train system that uh just keeps getting more
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expensive and never seems to be getting built uh can you kind of let us know what the status is
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going on with that dan so came to council and we voted on it and i think the vote was nine to six
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to continue with the uh with the project but it's something i've been listening and been interested in
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since i got elected uh three years ago um you talk to some of the city builders and the smart people in
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town like steve allen and jim gray who have been you'll see different articles and uh op-eds how
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they talk about how terrible this is how this could bankrupt the city going underground we always
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have problems we could have flooding issues uh so i was well aware that we had there was some issues
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for the scope of the project can we do it with the five and a half billion dollars that we've got for
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three levels of government and then over the last three years we would get updates from the green line
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board and they never wanted to make anything public and they kept a lot of this stuff even from
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council saying yeah we're on track we're on budget there's been no accidents until as their deadline
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came close just a few months ago then boom we had to make a decision right now that we're a billion
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and a half short uh and it's going to be a fraction of the size that we originally wanted it wanted it to
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be and then we have to go hustle up and see if we go find money from other levels of government
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which i have a lot of friends in the provincial government but as you know the ucp wasn't willing to
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throw any more money at what they call the nancy nightmare and if the feds didn't either so what
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the city now has to do is we've drained our piggy banks from all sorts of different reserves we're
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going to increase our borrowing and again we're not going to get hardly the near the line that we want
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so i'm really frustrated and disappointed i would hope to get a little bit more of a rethink on this and
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maybe a little bit of an audit on what's what more could go over budget because this is serious
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implications for the uh what we can provide for services for the city if we spent all of our
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money on this well yeah and and you know i guess just to play a bit of devil's advocate there's some
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people just saying pull the pin on this uh you know there's no sense throwing good money after bad
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but then there's the people who put up point out the sunk cost uh case i mean there's already been i
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believe one and a half billion spent on this the city's downtown has been ripped up for years as i
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guess they're rearranging underground utilities on it if they pull the pin on this thing that was
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would be all for for nothing uh but at the same time at the rate we're going i i don't know if
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there's ever going to be anything what sort of compromise might be found though well there's the
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old saying my dad told me don't throw good money after bad so yes we put a lot of money a lot of that
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money is put into land acquisition which uh again we can sell or maintain that's an asset that isn't just
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thrown out the window moving utility lines that's an upgraded infrastructure which as we've seen with
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the water pipe we're probably going to talk about later maybe this needed to be done anyways um
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you mentioned the downtown and that's the biggest problem i had with it and many others do as well
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is why we focus so much on starting downtown because that's where all the money goes as to the tunneling and
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the um cost overruns could happen my suggestion was always to go with a brt a bus rapid transit
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the whole idea for this green line is just to move people around or mass transit and where are the
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people down in the deep southeast by the hospital all the growth with the residents and commercial so
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and we're not even coming close to that right now we're stopping at starting at uh going from downtown to
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ogden millican it's just a stub of a line so my compromise would be corey to stop right now let's
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do brt from seaton all the way down to say city hall or at least to the stampede grounds then you
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can hop on other trains the red line or the blue line or different brts that go up center street and
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we can accomplish probably all of this within budget