Ward 9 Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra said he’s worried that the city-shaping aspect of Calgary’s $5.5 billion Green Line has fallen by the wayside.

As the Green Line team continues its negotiation with Bow Transit Connectors, development partner for Phase 1 of the transit megaproject, Coun. Carra is hoping a robust submission of concerns around Green Line stations in the southeast leg of the $5.5 billion transit megaproject can still have an impact. FULL DOCUMENT AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STORY.

Carra’s 17-page submission, complete with diagrams of the station sites and adjacent lands, covers the area’s lack of connectivity with multi-use pathways, how transit-oriented development is laid out, and, in some cases, a lack of collaboration with area landowners and residents.

“I think my list of concerns goes from sort of smaller opportunities to larger things that we need to do right now to not lose out on huge opportunities,” Carra told LWC.

“We did not want this to be a typical transit project where you just plop it in, and you don’t give a thought to the city shaping stuff.”

Carra had been meeting regularly with the Green Line team since the project’s inception, and instead of going back and forth with them, he wanted to summate his thoughts so it could be negotiated into the line’s development, he said.

He said it’s all about enabling integration and connection between the communities, increased density near transit stations and the transit stations themselves. Carra said he wanted to deliver it before the negotiation process went too far.

“They’re going to come to an agreement on everything that will be built and the price tag and everything that will be done,” Carra said.

“If Bow City Connectors can’t deliver it for the price tag, too bad, so sad. If somewhere along the process, the Green Line wants to do a change order, that’s where we get fun. So, the Green Line is very, very… I mean they’re built to be afraid of scope creep.”

No deviation from the plan: Green Line CEO

Darshpreet Bhatti, CEO of the Green Line, said the vision of the Green Line hasn’t been impacted. The city went through five years of planning, public consultations and feedback that culminated in the concept designs and documents.

He said the Green Line board is just the catalyst for moving the project ahead with a very specific mandate.

“Many things need to be done through planning and other initiatives led by the city,” Bhatti said.

He said the Green Line would take care of the properties that were given to them, along with the designs they have for those sites. Beyond that, it requires cooperation from the city’s mobility and planning units, Bhatti said.

“I would say the differences of what he’s expecting from Green Line to deliver right now versus what council awarded to our board as a mandate, that’s probably the only gap,” he said.

Bhatti said they would take gladly on this work, but they just don’t have the authority to do it. Nor are they privy to developer plans for the privately held land around the Green Line stations. That’s what makes figuring out one contiguous plan for connection a challenge.

“The city can give them policies, the city can give them different types of zoning, but it would have to be the private developer to come up with that concept,” Bhatti said.

“That doesn’t exist right now for a number of stations.”

Bhatti expects that discussions will get to that point, and integration with the infrastructure will play a key role on developments that pop up along the Green Line.  For now, they have to be cognizant of keeping a predictable schedule and cost.

“You don’t want to slow down your own procurement and your own initiatives, and later find out really there’s no other party on the table to dance with you,” he said.

Changes would have implications: Bhatti

Bhatti said that they’re now into procurement for the Green Line. They’ve been moving forward with certain assumptions based on the designs that came forward through work the city’s done over the past five years.

Any changes could impact cost and timeline, Bhatti said.

“If you fundamentally start changing those (designs), there are implications to it, but that’s a decision Council can always make that we need to introduce it,” he said.

“There will be cost implications of it.”

Bhatti said there are a lot of conversations to be had in the next three to five years as the Green Line takes shape. That’s the ideal time to bring a lot of this to the table, he said.

Carra believes what the city’s going to get with the Green Line is good. He wants to make it great. That’s why he articulated his thought in the fashion he did. He said there’s still time to make sure Calgary’s biggest ever infrastructure project is on the path to greatness. As far as timelines to get there and whose responsibility, Coun. Carra said he’s agnostic.

“Some of the great public spaces of Europe took 300 years to build, so we don’t have to deliver everything all at once,” he said.

“We just have to have a plan so that we don’t do anything that prevents us from getting from good to great.”

The City still expects the Green Line to enter the implementation phase in 2024. The development agreement, which began negotiations in April 2023, was expected to take 12 to 16 months to finalize.

Ward 9 GreenLine Station Design Feedback by Darren Krause on Scribd