Capital Line South LRT extension will cost an extra $240M after councillors approve increase in private

Council approves south LRT money in secret Edmonton will spend an additional $240 million on the south LRT after a secret council vote. Jeremy Thompson has the details.

The City of Edmonton will likely spend $240 million more than expected to get the LRT from Century Park to Heritage Valley.

Prep work for the southern extension is already underway and the mayor says without this increase, the city risks scrapping the project altogether.

So far the city has spent more than $70 million to prepare the LRT route from Century Park, south over Anthony Henday Drive, to Heritage Valley.

Late last month, council approved a 22 per cent increase to the project's budget — in private.

"I would say that [an] in-private conversation had to happen because we hadn't signed a contract yet," Anirniq coun. Erin Rutherford said.

The increase means the $1.1-billion project will now cost more than $1.3 billion, a change based on updated estimates from the unnamed company that submitted the best bid to build the train.

"It has nothing to do with cost overruns or anything else, we have always tried to trim it down and we have done in this case as well, to bring the cost down," Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said. "But this is the real cost of building this piece of infrastructure."

The provincial and federal governments agreed to pitch in a combined $742 million for the Capital Line extension back in 2020.

If council had balked at an extra $240 million now, the mayor says those partner dollars could have evaporated, along with the sunk cost of prepping the route.

"That’s the fastest growing area of the city and there’s issues around traffic movement, gridlock, and people need a choice, so we are investing in public transit to create that choice for people," Sohi said.

A city report cites the economy, inflation, supply chain struggles and labour shortages as causes for the cost increase.

Rutherford says more specific details were provided in private.

"What I was expecting was more public transparency in what is actually driving that cost so that I could explain that to Edmontonians," she said.

As the project cost rises, some councillors are second-guessing the urgency of getting the train to Ellerslie Road.

Others argue if it doesn't get built now costs will only keep going up.

The City of Edmonton provided the following construction timeline for the project:

"Major construction for Phase 1 of the Capital Line South Extension is anticipated to take 4–5 years to complete, followed by testing and commissioning. Major construction is anticipated to start along 111 Street in 2025. Early works construction along the alignment began in 2022 and will continue throughout 2024."