Your scribbler sat down with Devin Dreeshen, Smith’s point man on the Green Line LRT, and to say the man is eager to get going is an understatement.
Shovels in the ground this coming spring.
That’s the spring of 2025 for the first track to be laid on the Green Line LRT route running from 4th Street S.E., near where the new event centre/NHL area will be located, to Shepard.
Shepard is south of Ogden and Quarry Park and Douglas Glen but it is before you get to McKenzie Towne and further into the southeast.
Yes, that’s now where the government of Premier Danielle Smith and the council led by Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek look to be headed.
Your scribbler sat down with Devin Dreeshen, Smith’s point man on the Green Line LRT, and to say the man is eager to get going is an understatement.
“The hope would be for construction to start as soon as possible in 2025,” he says.
Dreeshen says the new alignment will be rolled out in December and the province would like city council to approve the line by the end of this year.
The proposal could come to the province’s Treasury Board early in the new year. They have the key to the Alberta government’s treasure chest of taxpayer dollars.
The federal government could jump through the required hoops at that time as well.
“We could actually see construction start this spring, in 2025, and finally see tracks laid on the Green Line after a decade of nothing,” says Dreeshen.
Why is it important to get this Green Line going when they could still be politicians and paper-shufflers wanting to drag their feet since their version of the line is now firmly located in the garbage can of history?
“For 10 years people have seen the drama that is the Green Line. It’s been constantly shrinking from its 46 kilometres down to 10 kilometres. This is the first time the Green Line has grown in size, yet zero kilometres have been laid.
“Our hope is we finally get the new alignment and after 10 years we can actually see Green Line track.”
Dreeshen says next month, a group will see some options for where the Green Line could go in the downtown and in the deep southeast.
The working group includes Dreeshen, Premier Smith, Mayor Gondek and councillors Andre Chabot and Peter Demong, as well as Myles McDougall, the UCP member of the legislature for Calgary Fish-Creek, who we are told has a background in economics and business.
Dreeshen confirmed once the Green Line is at the Event Centre it may not come into the downtown and connect with the existing line at City Hall, as some individuals suggested.
In fact, the Green Line is more likely to go west from the Event Centre through the Beltline and then come into the downtown quite a bit to the west of city hall.
The whole issue of how you get into the downtown without tunnels will involve sections running on the ground and sections elevated above the ground.
Then there is the question of what happens when the Green Line connects up with the existing LRT lines downtown. Where does it go?
The line could then go north to Eau Claire because one day people north of the river may get an LRT.
The line will almost certainly go from Shepard to the more-populated southeast communities.
In two months Calgarians will see the costing out of this line.
Dan McLean and Sonya Sharp were two councillors pushing for the Green Line to stay alive and for the city to work with the Smith government to get something done.
McLean still sounds upset anyone on city council would even talk of scrapping a Green Line.
These days McLean is “super-pleased.”
“I’m glad it’s getting fast-tracked. The public is telling us: Let’s get off the pot and build something that’s useful.”
The councillor shakes his head over what was going down at city hall when the Green Line’s future was said to be at stake.
“Different councillors were putting their finger in the pot and stirring it up. It was a Frankenstein line that kept getting changed.”
McLean says those running the show at city hall never took any accountability. It was always the provincial government’s fault.
“They made their bed and now I’m glad they’re not sleeping in it because that bed sucked.”