Freedm
Active Member
Cool. That's a lot sooner than I expected.
Valley Line LRT/ Valley Line West | ?m | ?s | City of Edmonton
- Thread starter Daveography
- Start date
Kaizen
Senior Member
From this morning.
Coronet RD looking East
Looking West
From Coronet RD (62 ave) & 83st, looking North towards Argyll (63 ave). I believe the plan still, is to close a couple blocks of Argyll this Saturday night until Sunday morning to
complete the span over the Ave.
Looking North from same location above.
Looking South on 63 ave at the "almost" complete Argyll LRT bridge.
Looking North on 63 ave
Coronet RD looking East
Looking West
From Coronet RD (62 ave) & 83st, looking North towards Argyll (63 ave). I believe the plan still, is to close a couple blocks of Argyll this Saturday night until Sunday morning to
complete the span over the Ave.
Looking North from same location above.
Looking South on 63 ave at the "almost" complete Argyll LRT bridge.
Looking North on 63 ave
Freedm
Active Member
Cool train track, but wow those power lines are ugly. ? Thanks for the pics!
I do wonder if the city knew this information beforehand from the province - might be the reason the construction schedule is so long for the west line. Not a bad move from the province if this is the case.
Member Bio
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2015
- Messages
- 10,218
- Reaction score
- 23,063
- Location
- Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
I was in the same room as Councillors Hamilton and Knack when they heard that LRT funding was being delayed. Their facial expressions indicated they had no idea this was coming. In fact, it goes against promises made by Kenney that funding agreements would be upheld.
The funding agreements aren't the same thing as LRT funding for the valley line. There wasn't a formal agreement in place for the valley line LRT money. (edit to say LRT valley line funding)
Iveson gave pretty good comments on it in my opinion. He acknowledges the province is still committed to medium term LRT funding, but that it moves the cost of interest on the borrowing to the city in the short term instead of the province. While not ideal, it could have been much worse news for the LRT.
Ending the City Charter agreement is kind of negotiating in bad faith in my opinion, but is also another thread. The Municipal Affairs Minister's comments over the last few months signalled some difficult changes were coming, but it likely should have been communicated differently.
Freedm
Active Member
So if I'm understanding the budget correctly, there will be no impact to the SE valley line, but potentially the West line. Is that correct?
Indeed. SE line is nearly finished.
West line is still committed, but the funding is deferred until later years, so the city will have to carry more debt at the front end of the project if they choose to proceed with it right away.
archited
Senior Member
Economic heresy -- when both Edmonton and Calgary economies are slowing, that is the precise time when the Province should be looking at investment (not cutbacks). Transferring debt to the Cities (ultimately transferred to property owners) makes the City governments look bad in terms of financing for commitments that have already been made. It also puts pressure on the Feds to renege on their infrastructure commitments (or at least tailor them back). Little wonder that Toronto-centric GDP is rising while Alberta's is falling. The new Provincial budget is bad news for the Cities which also impacts regional hinterland and should have the short term effect of deepening a recession.
Freedm
Active Member
Yes, it's bad news, but it had to be done and all things considered a 2.8% cut in spending is much less than I was expecting. The ironic thing is that the NDP are complaining about these cuts as if they're not the reason these cuts need to be made.
Why did it have to be done? Perhaps in the context of only looking at the problem from one lens, but certainly not if you approach it from a spending and revenue problem instead of only a spending problem. I'm not a NDP supporter and I'm complaining about the cuts too.
The Blue Ribbon Panel didn't look at revenue problems at all, only spending. The ironic thing is really that everyone turns the conversation into a false dilemma (the either or argument) and frame it primarily as a political conversation instead of an economic conversation where they include all the facts and figures instead of cherry picking data. You can make reasonable cuts while still increasing revenue. If the government were smart, they could introduce a provincial sales tax and have industry on board supporting them in that change - introducing about a billion in revenue per per cent of increase. If you do it as a progressive sales tax through rebates and product exemption (children's clothes, baby food, etc etc), it isn't that bad and you can introduce it as 2% and still be better off than the rest of the country. Stable revenue is something Alberta is lacking and the future outlook and presumption that oil revenue will bounce back proves that. One of these days, a government is going to have to look at stabilizing revenue. I keep hoping every time a new government comes in that they will do it. I had high hopes that this government would be the one, but here we are.
The cuts and freezes to the public sector are not going to be good in the long term. They aren't even good right now since management cost of living in the province has been frozen for several years, including under the NDP (think Prentice introduced the freeze for management). Part of the budget was cutting the management pension plan back, which was one of the last incentives for current managers to stick with the province. I do understand it from a fiscal restraint point of view though. There were not large manpower cost gains under the NDP; that happened before they were in power. Previous to the NDP, the province had to increase manpower costs to retain staff and to attract talent away from the private sector, which drove up per-capita costs relative to the rest of the country (those stats they do show you) Now, recommendation #11 from the Blue Ribbon Panel shows that the province must be having trouble retaining management and other non-bargaining positions, because they have froze those staff for several years, while private sector salaries have not been frozen.
The NDP was injecting money into the economy via capital spending. During a downturn, that isn't a bad thing. The GDP growth in Alberta was 2.3% last year, whereas the projection for 2019 is now 0.6%. Cutting government spending likely means we are going to enter into a period of negative GDP numbers. Instead of only the oil industry being in a bad place, now everyone is going to be in a bad place of speculation.
I didn't say what my opinion on the cuts to LRT were by the way - only stated what is happening as per the budget. @archited is absolutely correct that this budget will deepen a recession. The Federal government is going to have to step up and get a pipeline approved to enable the curtailments to end and have corporations begin spending more money in Alberta. You can cut corporate tax rates all you want, but when you limit production rates, it is hard for the oil industry to spend more money - see why Husky laid people off the other day. It goes back a few years. Why would they spend money here when there is no market access? There are compounding problems in that industry right now that have to be solved. Provincial government spending on infrastructure was one of the only things keeping our economy above water. We (as a province) are up shit creek right now no matter how you slice it. Ultimately, cutting services will get the province to balance, but there are better ways to get to balance as I mentioned earlier in this post.
Sorry for the long post.
archited
Senior Member
@westcoastjos VERY well put! (and the post was not too long)
Thanks!
I now see that there is a politics forum. The post can be moved/copied there as it is likely more relevant to the budget thread.
Kaizen
Senior Member
Freedm
Active Member
Slow progress, but progress.