Mayor Bruno Marchand announced the revised cost of the tramway system at a Nov. 1 news conference at City Hall.
Photo by Peter Black
Though the projected $8.365-billion cost is more than double the initial estimate five years ago, Mayor Bruno Marchand has said the city is still “all in” on the tramway project.
The mayor, in often impassioned language, unveiled the updated cost of the system at a Nov. 1 City Hall news conference, just days after being informed the only consortium bidding for the infrastructure contract, Mobilité de la Capitale, was unable to meet the deadline or guarantee financing.
Marchand said the city would now pursue the Plan B that’s been in the works for months, whereby the municipality itself would take over the infrastructure component of the system, acting as project manager and hiring the expertise to do the job. Marchand said the in-house management would save billions.
“We are not looking for profit and not dealing with the same risks as consortiums [so] we are able to reduce the price, and reduce it to a level which is acceptable in the context,” the mayor said. The budget projected with a consortium handling infrastructure could have reached $13 or $14 billion, he said.
According to a city release, the infrastructure work is essentially the entire design and construction of the 11.9-kilometre tramway line, including “tram platforms; stations; interchange hubs; the tunnel; the operation and maintenance centre; modal, operation and mobility systems; as well as certain municipal infrastructure, including underground networks, roads and urban developments.”
The mayor said the city has taken on multiple complex projects in the past, such as water treatment plants, the biomethanization plant, the new police station and even the Videotron Centre.
“Our employees are good. They’re at a high level. We have a lot of expertise. We have people who are very efficient. We have other companies that are ready to bring to the table what they offered us to do. We have the knowledge; we are able to do it, to deliver it on time and [on budget]. We think it’s the right amount of money to put in this project.”
The mayor said the Quebec government has known about the backup option since July, when the city presented a business plan. He said he plans to meet with Coalition Avenir Québec government ministers in the near future to discuss the project. Asked whether he believes he can convince the Legault government to get on board, Marchand said, “I hope so.”
He said he had spoken with Jean-Yves Duclos, the federal minister for procurement and MP for Québec, the morning of the announcement and was assured of the Liberal government’s commitment to fund 40 per cent of the project. Duclos said in a media report from Ottawa that there is money on the table to go toward the tramway’s increased cost, but if Quebec City doesn’t take advantage of it, other cities will.
Marchand played a video during the news conference which laid out the vision of the next phases of the tramway project, including routes serving the Charlesbourg and Lebourgneuf areas. It noted that by 2041, the city is projected to have 75,000 more residents making 100,000 additional trips around the city.
The mayor said the tramway would be built in three stages, the first and most complex being the section between Université Laval and the Le Gendre terminus in Cap-Rouge. The service garage is already under construction at the western terminus. About $500 million has been spent to date on tramway preparatory work and installations, the mayor said.
The subsequent phases would be the Saint-Roch to Université Laval line and then the Saint-Roch to D’Estimauville stretch.
Marchand said it is possible people will be able to use the first stage of the tramway line while the two other stretches are still under construction. He said the first phase of the project could be completed before the current target date of 2029.
Asked whether he was confident the project would come to fruition in the next decade, he said, “I am totally confident that this is the project we need. This is a solution to our challenges, so we need to do it, and it’s the only one we can do.
“It’s not a matter of months, it’s a matter of years if we wait or if we build a new project. We take the pragmatic solution. We build a good project, the best project we could build, the project that the federal [government] is into and we need the government of Quebec to be into it as much as we are and to start it as soon as possible.”