Brampton faces turmoil ahead of LRT vote

Leaders and residents are more divided than ever over the future of $1.6-billion light-rail project and its route through the city.

Thestar.com
Oct. 26, 2015
By San Grewal

If there is any consensus in Brampton about Tuesday’s historic vote on the future of a $1.6 billion LRT, it’s that the issue has divided city council and many in the community.

Mayor Linda Jeffrey, has entered into a war with the man who was once her biggest political backer, former Ontario premier Bill Davis; a resident tried unsuccessfully to get a court injunction to prevent a councillor from voting Tuesday; the city’s board of trade got into a public dispute with a prominent local lawyer over the light rail transit; and a last-ditch, $53,000 attempt at a facilitation process seems to have failed.

The original vote was scheduled in June, but has twice been postponed.

On one side, Jeffrey and councillors Martin Medeiros, Gurpreet Dhillon, Gael Miles and Pat Fortini say the province’s proposed Main St. route will finally revive the city’s struggling downtown core, and transit ridership will grow.

On the other side are councillors John Sprovieri, Elaine Moore, Jeff Bowman, Doug Whillans and Grant Gibson, arguing there is not enough ridership along the route to justify an LRT, that Brampton should get a similar length of LRT line as Mississauga, and that other options would better serve Brampton’s needs.

Councillor Michael Palleschi has maintained throughout the months-long feud that he hasn’t made up his mind.

Anticipating plenty of public interest, the council meeting will be at the Rose Theatre. But it’s unclear what the outcome might be.

The province has agreed to fund the full capital cost of the Hurontario-Main LRT project, $1.6 billion, and supports the Main St. route in Brampton. About 17.6 kilometres of the line will be in Mississauga (where council has approved the project) and 5.6 kilometres would be in Brampton. If Brampton rejects the route, it’s not clear what would happen to the money dedicated to it.

The acrimony reached a boiling point last week when Jeffrey sent a public response to Davis. Jeffrey, who had earlier appointed Davis as the chair of a new committee to help the city land its first university, accused him in a letter of having a personal interest in the LRT matter.

“Despite Mr. Davis’s misgivings about an LRT route in front of his Main St. property, I will be voting in support of the Hurontario main light rail transit option,” Jeffrey’s letter, dated Oct. 23, states. “I believe the (university committee) chair overstepped his mandate and has raised some serious questions about the ethics and relevance of the (university) panel.”

In an open letter to council a couple of days earlier, Davis confronted Jeffrey after she said a vote against the Main St. LRT route would hurt Brampton’s chances of getting its first university.

“By portending that a particular transit option and route is a precondition to our ability to be successful is not only unfounded but unhelpful as it suggests that this community is not committed to greater transit accessibility which is patently untrue,” Davis said in his letter.

The LRT debate grew even more heated on Friday, when the Brampton Board of Trade released a newsletter tha claimed a lawyer from a “prominent Brampton firm” had “threatened severe consequences” to the Board of Trade if it continued its push for the Main St. route.

Then, later on Friday, it was reported that a Brampton resident had filed a request with the Superior Court for an injunction to block Medeiros from voting Tuesday. The application alleged Medeiros had “misrepresented” his place of residence when he applied to run for city council last year and at the time did not even live in Brampton, therefore should not have been allowed to run. He has since moved to Brampton. On Monday, the court dismissed the injunction.

As the turmoil unfolded, a facilitator hired by the city at council’s request to help find a consensus, at a cost of more than $53,000, has struggled to bring both sides together. Jeffrey had said she was not going to change her mind on the issue.

An attempt to hold a last-minute facilitation session Monday failed.

Asked if the process had in fact helped toward finding a consensus, LRT facilitator Lee Parsons said: “I don’t know if there was any headway, as far as a vote (goes).”

As council prepares to make what many residents are calling the biggest decision they will ever face, the city and its leaders appear more divided than ever.