From the Calgary Herald – March 11, 2010

In killing the Airport Trail tunnel, city council has made an irreversible error whose impact will be felt for generations.

Despite assurances that the issue will be revisited once the new runway is built, there is no way it will happen.

For better or worse, from 2011 forward, the citizens of east Calgary will be cut off from the airport, we will never have adequate transit access for 18,000 workers, and a number of businesses built to serve travellers will fail.

(And don’t get me started on 36th Street as an alternative; this 11-kilometre detour is a narrow strip of potholed pavement, no shoulders and no lane markings, ending at a stop sign at Country Hills Boulevard.)

There’s a lot of blame to go around here: the feds and the province failed to pony up the cash. The Calgary Airport Authority has been ambivalent at best about the tunnel. Conspiracy theories about the latter abound — was the airport loath to give up even a stripe of potentially developable land? Are they so in thrall of parking revenues and taxi concessions that they oppose anything that may lead to better transit service to YYC?

It doesn’t really matter. It’s not the airport authority’s responsibility to fight for citizens. No, that job rightly lives with city council, and it is council that has failed us.

Let’s recap: the airport’s plans for a new runway, and the city’s plans to tunnel under it, have been on the books forever. Countless businesses, including the whole strip of hotels and restaurants along Barlow Trail, have been built based upon these plans.

Some years ago, the airport authority wrote to the city, asking for confirmation that they should be including the tunnel in their plans. The city’s transportation boss wrote back saying it would not be built, despite the tunnel appearing in all the city’s documents and plans. Council was not notified, and there was no debate.

It wasn’t until after the 2007 election that newly minted Alderman Jim Stevenson noticed the change. He was told that it was his job to find the money to build it. I can think of no other instance when an alderman was treated this way: Druh Farrell didn’t have to throw a bake sale for the Peace Bridge, Brian Pincott wasn’t asked to go begging to the province for the Glenmore/37th interchange.

To Stevenson’s credit, he has worked like a madman since, mobilizing community support through the Airport Trail Access Committee. All the while, he has been fighting his own council colleagues and a belligerent city administration, none of whom, even though council voted again and again for the tunnel, ever championed it. (Stevenson says that even Mayor Dave Bronconnier, who vowed in front of N.E. citizens that he would fight for them, characterized the tunnel as merely a “nice-to-have” in private meetings with the provincial and federal governments.)

The province and feds are sadly correct in saying that they’ve provided plenty of infrastructure funds to this city, and that this tunnel never seemed to make their list.

So, we have a council that happily funded an extension to the northwest LRT that wasn’t even in Calgary Transit’s strategic plan when they approved it ($100 million) and a northeast extension that turns away from the airport ($130 million including an interchange) but that could not bring itself to build the single most important and time-sensitive piece of road infrastructure (another $200 million is needed).

Can the tunnel be saved? Of course. Council could borrow the money. They could do it in a P3. Most easily, they could defer other projects. Yes, that would mean Glenmore and 37th would suck a bit longer, or that those LRT extensions would open a year or two later, but at least these projects could still be done in the future, while the tunnel cannot.

To make any of these choices, though, will take a council with guts and the ability to make tough choices. Do we have one of those?

Note to readers: This will be my last regular column on this page for a while. Thanks to my editor for her support and mentorship, and to all of you readers for letting me join the conversation with you.

Naheed Nenshi teaches at Mount Royal University’s Bissett School of Business.

« Back to “In His Own Words”