Scarborough transit details sketchy

City staff exaggerated progress on subway, downplayed LRT plans

Thestar.com
April 14, 2018
By Jennifer Pagliaro

When Toronto councillors voted in July 2016 in favour of the $3.35-billion, one-stop Scarborough subway over the LRT, the information they had about its design was exaggerated by city staff, rushed by consultants and based on hand-drawn sketches.

The Star reviewed internal documents that warn of "time constraints" and "insufficient information," staff reports, independent peer reviews and comments made by city staff to council before that key July vote.

They show that city staff also significantly downplayed the progress of the seven-stop LRT alternative that was years ahead in the planning process.

While city officials told council before the vote that the subway's design was at "approximately" 5 per cent, work was not that far along, documents show. A project's design is directly linked to its cost estimate.

When taken together, the information provided by city staff cast the one-stop subway, which was ballooning in cost, in a more favourable light at a time when council was under pressure to choose the project promised by Mayor John Tory.

They did so without seeing any study on whether the 6.2kilometre subway extension was good value for money.

"It's deeply troubling that it appears that council and the public were told that a subway project practically drawn on the back of a napkin was as far along as the LRT plan that was supported by a 300-page environmental assessment," Councillor Josh Matlow, who has long pushed for a network of LRTs in Scarborough that would put more people closer to rapid transit, told the Star. "Enough is enough."

All Toronto homeowners are on the hook for a special tax to fund the subway, from Kennedy Station to a new Scarborough Town Centre stop, for at least 30 years. The LRT would have been fully funded by the province.

With an accurate cost of the Scarborough subway still unknown, and evidence that the project is not a worthwhile use of money, questions over design and what council was told when they opted for the subway over the LRT remain relevant.

A new form of transit is needed to replace the aging Scarborough RT. The previous term of council switched to a subway plan in 2013 at the urging of then-mayor Rob Ford, scrapping years of work on a sevenstop LRT already agreed to with the province.

Ford's brother, Doug Ford, is now leader of the Ontario PC party and vying to be premier in June. Tory is seeking re-election to the mayoral seat this October.

At the July 2016 vote, the TTC's former chief project manager for the subway, Rick Thompson, said the subway option was at "about 5 per cent" design-wise. A city staff report tabled at that meeting said the same.

But a team of consultants working with city staff on the project reported some four months later, in November, that the "earlier" design provided to council in July "pre-dates the current 5 (per cent) design level."

At a meeting another four months later, in March 2017, council was given a consultant's review that said the design of the subway was at 2 to 5 per cent. That level of design was based on five internal documents, only one of which was actually prepared before the July 2016 meeting.

If all five documents amounted to 2- to 5-per-cent design work in March 2017, that means it would have been impossible for the subway to be at 5 per cent in July 2016, as council was told.

The one document that was completed in time for the July 2016 vote, provided to the Star by the TTC, was a 22-page "technical memo" about a new station at the Scarborough Town Centre. It included three hand-drawn sketches, three satellite maps and a handful of technical drawings. It did not detail any other parts of the project, such as the six-kilometre tunnel. Council never saw that document.

Between July 2016 and March 2017, the extent of design for the subway reported by staff didn't change, despite work on the project continuing following the outcome of the vote.

In a joint response Wednesday, the city and TTC said there is "no distinguishable difference in two to three percentage points at such an early stage" and that there was "not significant progression of the design" in those eight months.

That contradicts what the TTC told the Star in February of this year. A spokesperson, Stuart Green, said then that the subway design presented to council in July was an "earlier version" and that in the months after that vote there were "significant changes."

It's unclear how the design changed significantly but did not significantly progress.

The level of design of an infrastructure project is tied to the accuracy of the cost - the further along in the design, the better experts are able to accurate- ly predict how much money will be needed to build it.

In 2013, council approved building a three-stop Scarborough subway based on zero design work. Their estimate - $3.56 billion - was off by more than a billion dollars, a more recent estimate of what that project would have cost shows.

At the same time council was told in July 2016 that the design of the one-stop subway was at 5 per cent, staff claimed the LRT alternative - preferred by some councillors who were lobbying for its return at that vote - was at a similar stage in its design.

Now retired deputy city manager John Livey told council at the July 2016 vote, in response to a question about the LRT's design progress from TTC chair Josh Colle, that some aspects were at 5 per cent and others at 10 per cent.

Yet a 2012 report from staff to the board of Metrolinx, the provincial agency that was in charge of building the LRT, said that the completion of the design was at "30 per cent." A 2012 TTC report to its board also said the LRT project was at 30per-cent design.

In March 2017, after the July vote, former city manager Peter Wallace confirmed the LRT was at 30-per-cent design before the vote, after Matlow pointed out the discrepancy in what city staff had told council at the vote - that it was 5 per cent to 10 per cent - and the 2012 reports that showed it was at 30 per cent.

In the weeks leading up to the July vote, council was also told that returning to the LRT plan would cause years of delay.

Though necessary provincial studies and 30 per cent of design work had already been completed, a TTC briefing note claimed staff would need 12 to 18 months to return with a revised plan should council choose the LRT.

Despite what staff said about the LRT, there was a big difference in where the two options were at in the planning process.

In January 2013, before the LRT project was cancelled by the Ford administration in favour of a subway, the province began vetting qualified companies to build the LRT line - the first step in the construction process.

The current one-stop subway plan will not be ready for that first step until at least January 2019, when staff expect the subway design to be at 30 per cent and council to vote on whether to move forward with construction. That means that when council opted to pursue the subway plan in July 2016, the LRT was two and a half years closer to breaking ground.

Matlow plans to question staff about the design discrepancies through formal inquiries at a council meeting later this month.

Internal TTC documents earlier obtained by the Star through a freedom of information request reveal that an updated, more accurate cost estimate for the current subway plan will be available this September - before the municipal election in October. But city staff don't plan to release that information until January 2019.

Tory relentlessly defended his continued support of the onestop subway as the vote approached in July 2016. The three-stop option, he told reporters, had been approved by a previous council "without the support of any planning or design work actually having been done."

"In fact," he said, "it was based on a sketch on a piece of paper given to the TTC."

In an opinion piece published in the Star, Tory said council had moved on from that kind of politics.

"There is no doubt the original decision to cancel a planned LRT in Scarborough and extend the subway instead was made without enough information or process, but I cannot let the mistakes of the past cloud my judgment on what Toronto needs for the future."