Province agrees to preserve some existing work on Green Line LRT following Calgary mayor's letter

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek says the provincial government has agreed to her request to try salvaging some work from the Green Line LRT project while it considers a new alignment.

It comes after Gondek sent a letter to Premier Danielle Smith and Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen, which the mayor posted to social media on Thursday evening. 

In her post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Gondek said if the province were to use some of the city's existing work in its new alignment, it could temporarily save up to 700 jobs and and taxpayer money.

"For example, retaining the existing contract for low-floor vehicles allows design work to continue, prevents a new procurement process and expedites construction," Gondek said in her letter. "Further, maintaining the existing contract for the design work on the segment that stretches from Fourth Street S.E. to Shepard would provide the same benefits."

Gondek says the provincial government had previously rejected the idea twice, but on Thursday, it agreed to the mayor's request.

"For me, trying one more time, doing that Hail Mary pass to see if we could at least sit down and discuss how to salvage parts of a program that not longer exists, had to be done. I had tried twice before. I was going to go for a third time and, fortunately, we are able to move forward," Gondek told reporters on Friday.

She added that some contractors have already left the project, and the city has not yet announced a layoff plan for its 250 Green Line employees.

"The mayor's letter from last night and the productive phone call that we had with her this morning was a really great development," Dreeshen told CBC News on Friday afternoon.

The minister says the Alberta government wants the Green Line built, but the biggest issue between the province and the city came down to underground tunnelling, which Dreeshen says added substantially to the overall cost of the project.

"The province wanted to extend [the line] to the southeast where most Calgarians are, a lot of Calgarians live," he said. 

"It's great to see that the city wants to work with the province to resolve that."

The provincial government has hired infrastructure consulting firm AECOM to come up with a new alignment for the Green Line by December. The province wants to forgo plans to tunnel through downtown Calgary in favour of laying tracks above ground to extend the line further into the city's southeast quadrant.

Plans for the Green Line were most recently upended when Dreeshen pulled the province's share of funding on Sept. 3. Since then, city council voted to halt the transit expansion project with costs totalling $2.1 billion, including $850 million to wind it down.

WATCH | Calgary's wind-down costs: