Bury western LRT extension on our land or no deal, NCC tells city
By David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen June 28, 2013
OTTAWA — If you want to put your rail line on our land, you’re going to have to bury it, the National Capital Commission’s board told the city government Friday.
In a resolution the NCC board debated in private but unanimously approved in a brief public afternoon session, the commission said any western extension of the city’s light-rail system that uses land along its Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway corridor will have to allow “unimpeded continuous access to the corridor lands and the shorelines of the Ottawa River” and have “minimal visual impact on the corridor landscape quality and its experience by users.”
Practically speaking, the commission’s chairman, Russell Mills, told reporters afterward, that will mean burying the line for 1.2 kilometres between Dominion transit station and Cleary Avenue, where the city’s planned line would cut south into a tunnel under Richmond Road. If there’s some other way to achieve the same end, he said, the NCC is open to it, but he can’t imagine what that might be.
“The board thinks that the best and most obvious solution would be to put the entire 1.2 kilometres underground. The city’s last proposal was 700 metres are covered, why not cover the whole thing? We’ve never seen a plan like that,” Mills said.
What this means for a planning schedule that had city council’s transportation committee voting on July 10 to go ahead with a plan the commission has cast aside isn’t clear. The committee’s chairman, Coun. Keith Egli, is out of town and told the Citizen by email Friday that he hasn’t been following what’s been going on. Mayor Jim Watson’s spokesman, Ryan Kennery, said the mayor would talk it over with councillors and city staff next week.
There’s plenty of blame to go around: the commission has set its standard for giving up any of its land for rail very high but has been consistent for months about where that standard is, and the city has proposed several variants of a rail plan that don’t meet it.
In its latest bid, the city earlier this week presented the NCC with a vision for a partially underground line that would cover 700 of the 1,200 metres of land the city needs, with tracks mostly covered by a landscaped berm but with occasional openings along the river side for light and air.
“They’re kind of marginal. They’re sort of on the boundary of what might be acceptable,” Mills said. He’d like reassurance that what the city is proposing is actually feasible — that the water table close to the river wouldn’t make it prohibitively expensive, for instance.
“We need to see how low the train could actually go, and once we see that, we’ll know how high it has to be,” he said of the berm the city intends to build atop the tracks to conceal them from nearby residents.
Mills has been saying more or less the same thing since April, when the city first came out with a plan that would require NCC property for a critical portion of a much longer rail line between Tunney’s Pasture and Baseline station. That would have cost an estimated $900 million; the revised version with 700 partly buried metres would cost about $80 million more. That version came with new pedestrian tunnels under the NCC’s parkway running along the river and new pathway connections to the neighbourhoods just to the south, but Mills said it’s important to have no obstacles blocking pedestrians’ way to the road at all.
The city’s lead consultant on its rail plans, David Hopper of the engineering firm Delcan, has roughly estimated the cost of giving the NCC what it wants at between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion. Another part of the commission’s Friday resolution requires the city to prepare a detailed plan for that and present it to the board at its next meeting in September.
That would include a much more detailed cost estimate, said the city staff engineer in charge of the project, Kornel Mucsi, who watched the NCC vote. Hopper’s numbers are first approximations. “They’re kind of high-level estimates, but we haven’t worked out that detail,” Mucsi said.
His boss, deputy city manager Nancy Schepers, has said that every dollar the city spends on this line is a dollar it won’t have available for other transit projects. The City of Ottawa has budgeted $4 billion for all its rail projects between now and 2031, including its $900-million share of the downtown rail line now under construction.
There’s only one chance to get the plan right and the cost isn’t the NCC’s problem, Mills said. “This land belongs to all the people of Canada. We have to be very careful how we give it up for a local use,” he said. And if the city wants any of it, it’ll have to make its case to the board’s satisfaction.
He pointed out that even the $980-million figure is only preliminary, what engineers call a “Class D estimate.” It includes both a 40-per-cent contingency budget (meaning the city’s planners’ real best guess is that building the whole line would cost about $700 million but they added $280 million to be on the safe side) and a warning that it could be out by a further 25 per cent in either direction.
Maybe finer work will lead to the conclusion that the line doesn’t have to be expensive, Mills said. “Let’s see the details on the rest of it,” he said.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com/greaterottawa
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