Reality rains on Mississauga's LRT celebration

City council rejoices in Ontario’s $1.6B pledge to build a long-desired Hurontario LRT. But it still has to find money to cover peripheral costs.

Thestar.com
April 22, 2015
By San Grewal

It was a party with everything but the champagne inside Mississauga council chambers Wednesday, as councillors and Mayor Bonnie Crombie gushed over their $1.6-billion transit windfall from the province.

But after the back-slapping and grandiose proclamations about Tuesday’s “transformative” announcement by Queen’s Park that the province would fund 100 per cent of the Hurontario LRT, the scale of the project quickly sunk in.

“We need to take a look at what the peripheral costs could be,” said Councillor Carolyn Parrish. “We need to start putting some money away.”

The funding agreement is a monumental victory for this booming city - the country’s sixth largest - which councillors claimed Wednesday is too often overlooked while Toronto eats up most of the GTA’s higher-level government funding for infrastructure.

“They (the Liberal government) really get the idea of regional transportation,” Councillor Jim Tovey crowed. “It’s not all about Toronto. Well what about Toronto? Poor Toronto, they already got $10 billion for transit.”

Mississauga councillors have routinely pointed to the demographics - Toronto had about 2.8 million residents in 2013, compared with about 3.7 million in the so-called 905 regions, according to Statistics Canada - to back up claims that the municipalities outside Toronto are overlooked.

An LRT running along the city’s north-south spine is no longer a distant promise - a proposal that city staff admitted in January could not happen if the city had to contribute any core funding. But now city council has to figure out how to pay for additional costs, such as massive traffic re-direction, resurfacing, moving utility infrastructure and all the bells and whistles already being promised.

“I want iconic stations,” Councillor Nando Iannicca waxed on inside the council chamber, conjuring images of grand European railway buildings. “I’m thinking of the tremendous iconic stations in Paris.”

City manager Janice Baker tried to rein in some of the excitement, sounding almost overwhelmed about the spin-off effects of the $1.6 billion pledge that sets the massive project, unlike anything the city has ever undertaken, hurtling forward.

“The prettier you want it to be - and I know there’s going to be a lot of demand for that - if we’re not able to find alternative funding sources, that’s going to drive the cost up. We will see where we get the biggest bang for our buck.”

But Crombie, Parrish, Iannicca and others on council are already thinking about those alternative funding sources.

Iannicca said those who will benefit most from the game-changing light rail transit “have to contribute the most.” He talked about ways of funding tens of millions of dollars that will be needed to cover the city’s peripheral capital costs, adding: “I may have a developer who may donate a half million dollars for the first (station).”

Iannicca also talked of capturing land-value increases, saying an acre of land along the southern corridor of the LRT route is already worth $5 million.

Crombie said formulas for collecting development charges might have to change, given the amount of money commercial developments will draw thanks to the traffic the LRT will deliver.

“The hard work is about to begin,” Crombie said, acknowledging that the honeymoon period for the city’s biggest funding coup will end quickly. “Even to begin construction in two years, there will be a lot of work that will need to be done.”