Updated June 8, 2012 at 11:00am: My comments about the Commission’s action appear in an article on the Torontoist website.
Updated June 1, 2012 at 9:15am: The motions passed at the TTC meeting of May 30 have been added at the end of this article. The Commission took a much more conciliatory view of their relationship with Metrolinx than the staff report. I will be writing about this situation in a separate article.
The original May 29 article follows below.
The Supplementary Agenda for the May 30, 2012 TTC meeting includes a report “LRT Projects in Toronto — Project Delivery”.
This report deals with the proposed transfer of responsibility for the Transit City LRT projects on Eglinton, Sheppard, Finch and the SRT replacement from the TTC to Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario.
As TTC reports go, this one is rather oddly worded in that it:
- asks the Commission to “note” a number of factors,
- requests that provincial agencies respond to various issues,
- sets an October 31, 2012 deadline for the transfer of project control, and
- proposes that the TTC’s own staff now dedicated to the LRT projects be redeployed internally.
In effect, the TTC is taking their ball and going home rather than play with the guys from down the block. This suggests a strained relationship between agencies notwithstanding the soothing words we hear so often, and a sense that a fed up TTC is telling Queen’s Park to get lost.
From a purely political and administrative point of view, Queen’s Park holds all the cards because they are paying almost the entire cost (with a small Ottawa contribution to Sheppard) for these projects. It’s their money, and they get to say how it will be spent. Whether it will be spent wisely, and how the projects might fare with the TTC on the sidelines, these are questions that won’t be answered for years until we see the results.
Steve Munro 