Quote:
Originally Posted by moncton golden flames
So, we have roughly 6B for the project. 2.2B for North and South BRTs. Downtown tunnel is going to cost more than 3B?
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A few things to consider:
- we had $4.6B for the project because each funding partner would do $1.53B
- So the latest $6.3B is actually $3.3B from the city and $1.5B from each of the others
- the province paid for like 90%* of the Blue line west. I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than that, but the city has gone from paying maybe $200M out of pocket for that line ~13 years ago to a lot more this time
- either current option (tunnel isn't really an option anymore but I digress) is predicated on the idea of spending a lot more in the future to build out and make them useful
- which is generally okay as there
should be more funding to come from the other partners, but its also reasonable to worry about that
- Calgary's CFO was 'fired' a few weeks ago in the midst of a budget grandstanding process by councillors worried about the upcoming election
- I speculate she was professionally unwilling to compromise the city's financial position any further by more plundering of reserves/etc, but held her ground to be fired instead of resigning and losing severance
- There is a lot of specialized nuance with this theory, and there are certainly lots of other possible explanations
The TLDR is that we should be very concerned about the value we get from an unprecedented level of city spending. I'm not normally one to really GAF about gov't spending, but this might actually be pretty ####ed up. The city has more than doubled its initial commitment to get waaaaaaaaaay less than initially expected. $3.3B from the city for an underground stub or elevated stub+ would have been considered laughably insane a decade ago. But we've frog-boiled ourselves into thinking it's not