On Monday during a city council meeting, councillors received confidential information about the project behind closed doors.
“To provide some extra protection and make sure that the full project gets completed as we get funding from the other two levels of government,” she said.
Stage one of the line, which was supposed to start construction in 2021, would begin the project in the southeast community of Shepard and stretch it up to Inglewood and Ramsay.
But for several months, the province has been reviewing its commitment of $1.5 billion towards the nearly $5 billion deal.
“There’s been a lot of changes with the Green Line,” said LRT on the Green President Jeff Binks.
There are already pandemic-related cost concerns, as material costs have skyrocketed since last year.
“The last thing you want to do is build something that doesn’t connect to anything, and so because it’s all one big project we want to make sure that the early work actually gets people to where they need to go,” he said.
Gondek said that due diligence had been done almost a year ago with the approval of more than a dozen recommendations, one of which was to look at taking transit money and putting it towards the Green Line to keep the finances steady.
“We are competing, North America-wide, with other cities that have made big, bold announcements saying they believe in transit projects, so that’s what I’m hyper aware of.