What Ottawa’s Stage Two Will Get for $4.66 Billion
Ottawa’s LRT is expanding.
Mind you Ottawa’s, the Stage 2 LRT program went from $3.6 Billion to $4.7 Billion.
This was due to three reasons.
1. Inflation from the 2015-2016 price estimate, mainly concrete and paying user fees for the new lower carbon emitting concrete formulas. Concrete emits massive amounts of polluting gasses like CO2, during the curing process. All of the specialized steel needed for construction (only 3 steel mills make it, 2 USA, 1 Sweden ) are located in countries in which we slap a 25% import duty on this special product, until Trump we got stock US prices for the 2 US steel mills.
2. Originally the Stage 2 LRT project was adding only 30 km of service, now due to a upward scope pressure, mainly political, we have to pay for 44 km of service.
3. When the 3 final P3 proponents crunched the numbers none of them could build the add ons to the Confederation Line for the amount the city wanted, all were a minimum of $600 million over the city of Ottawa’s maximum amount!
- The extension of SkyTrain to Fleetwood – $1.65 billion (funded)
- The extension of SkyTrain from Fleetwood to Langley – at least $1.5 billion (unfunded)
- The Broadway subway to Arbutus – $3.5 billion. (funded to $2.8 billion not including cars)
- The Broadway subway extension from Arbutus to UBC – at least $4 billion. (unfunded)
- The Expo and Millennium line rehab, to increase capacity – $3 billion (full cost – unfunded).
The list does not include the minimum $2 billion rehab of the Canada Line, in increase its capacity, in 25 years hence, when the P-3 ends and the Canada line is handed back to Metro Vancouver and TransLink.
Over $11 billion in direct SkyTrain costs in the next decade or so and not a hint in huge increases in the operating costs for the BS Line; an estimate $40 million, just for the SkyTrain subway to Arbutus!
Council voted yesterday and by a vote of 19 – 3 passed the $4.66 Billion plan. It wasn’t easy the meeting went for hours and hours longer than normal and there was much nashing of teeth, quite a bit of screaming as well as more than a few motions to delay the final decision by 2 to 4 weeks. Full construction begins in in 2 to 3 weeks. Keep in mind, we have been hammering this plan out for 4 years now! Some suburban councilors were quoted saying that;
“Regardless of the change in scope (30 km to 44 km) and the surprising last minute $1.2 Billion price jump, if we want Stage 3 LRT to Kanata, Barrhaven and across to Gatineau, Quebec, we have to build Stage 2!”
Kanata and Barrhaven are 2 large fast growing suburban areas south of the National Capital Greenbelt in Ottawa
Many councillors did comment that their support was given quite begrudgingly! Many were still very annoyed about how little notice they were given (2-3 weeks) between the announcement of the winning proponents and $the 1.2 Billion price jump at the end of the 3rd week of February and having to pass the final go or no go construction vote in at the end of the first week of March. I was quite surprised it was actually a 19 – 3 vote in favor, I thought it would be far closer!
Opps, Kanata is west, west of the Greenbelt. Barrhaven is south of the Greenbelt. Page 109 of the Technical Report has the map.