Green Line LRT would hit brakes under mayor Smith

Blasting the Green Line as city hall’s biggest boondoggle, mayoral candidate Bill Smith says he would hit pause and re-evaluate the multibillion-dollar transit project slated to begin construction in 2020.

If elected, Smith would stop all work on the Green Line and examine rerouting the transit project either deep into the city’s north or far into the south.

“$4.5 billion for 46 kilometres now turned into $4.6 billion for 20 kilometres,” Smith told a Postmedia editorial board on Thursday.

“Has there been a bigger boondoggle in our city?”

In May, the city’s transportation boss said what was originally touted as a $4.5-billion, 28-station, 46-kilometre transit line from 160th Avenue N. to Seton in the deep south would be split into segments.

The first phase will cost $4.65 billion and stretch 20 kilometres, and include 14 stations from a maintenance facility at 126th Avenue S. through the downtown to 16th Avenue N.

“That, to me, I’m speechless,” Smith said. “Who gave you an estimate that was half, on a multibillion-dollar project, of what it was going to cost?”

The businessman and lawyer said the current plans for the project’s first stretch simply don’t make sense.

“What’s the purpose of the Green Line? To me, I understand there are two purposes: one to serve the north and the other was to serve the south. I don’t think that this solution serves either,” Smith said of Phase 1.

“We have to figure out, if we’re going to go south, let’s freaking go south, let’s get down there, let’s get to the hospital and let’s figure out a way to make it happen. Or, if we’re going to go north, let’s figure out a way to make it go north. But doing the piece in the middle just doesn’t make any sense.”

Lawyer Bill Smith used to run into burning buildings as a longtime Calgary firefighter. So, it’s perhaps not surprising the born-and-raised mayoral candidate looked as cool as a craft beer while he sat in the hot seat of a Calgary Herald editorial board meeting Thursday for an hour and a half.

That inclination to rescue others is why Smith — a lifelong volunteer for numerous charitable and community associations — says he decided to run for mayor.

“My motivation for this stems from conversations with friends where we all said, ‘Things need to change, we need to do something about this, but who’s going to do it?’ and somewhere around April and May, I said to myself, ‘You know what, I’m going to do it, I’m going to step up, I’m going to offer my services up to Calgarians.’”

While Calgary has struggled through a long recession during which people lost their jobs and have been forced to cut their budgets, city hall’s workforce and civic salaries have grown, while residential and business taxes have risen 51 and 70 per cent respectively in the past seven years Naheed Nenshi has been mayor.

“Mayor Nenshi announced a City Hall hiring freeze just a couple of weeks ago,” said Smith, the owner, president and CEO of law firm Legal Innovations. “He’s had seven years to control things and he announced that just now?” questioned Smith at the end of the meeting.

While Smith came across cool, the 6-foot-4 former Calgary Dinos football player — whose team won the Vanier Cup in 1985 — got fired up when asked about Nenshi’s criticism of his stint as volunteer president of the Alberta Progressive Conservative party from 2010 to 2013.

Nenshi said “illegal donations” were accepted by the PC party during those years from Edmonton Oilers owner Daryl Katz and his associates.

“I’m not going to drop the word defamation right now, but I may later on,” Smith said. “The Katz donation that came later on was investigated by Elections Alberta thoroughly. Everybody was cleared of any wrongdoing. That sounds to me like defamation and I’m getting tired of it.”

When asked why he hasn’t released a list of who has donated to his election campaign, Smith says he’s following the rules.

“(Nenshi’s) trying to bully us by suggesting that there’s something nefarious going on. I’m following the rules and will continue to follow the rules. He had seven years to change this,” Smith adds.

“It seems to me that seven years ago we were going to get electoral reform, a tunnel to nowhere and secondary suites. Well, we got a tunnel to nowhere,” said Smith, referring to the airport tunnel that cost $400 million. “Nice work.”

Smith, who also has a Master’s degree in administration, mused whether the people who donated close to $300,000 to Nenshi’s legal-expense fund “somehow have some magic hold over him,” after the mayor in 2013 was sued for libel by Calgary home builder Cal Wenzel.

Those donors were allowed to give as much as $10,000, rather than just the $5,000 limit for the civic election.

“Isn’t that something that’s a little troubling, or that 25 per cent of council meetings are held in camera, 748 of them?”

For a candidate who has been criticized as being little more than the best “anti-Nenshi candidate,” Smith was remarkably knowledgeable about issues in the city, rattling off about “tweaks” to some bike lanes, questioning the wisdom of the city’s Green Line LRT plans and other key issues.

Nevertheless, he says he’s running with a simple message, “to work very hard to get our spending in line, to get our taxes in line, to make this a friendlier city to do business in and a friendlier city for all of our citizens.”

That message has clearly resonated. In a recent Mainstreet poll for Postmedia, Smith had a nine-point lead over Nenshi.

Whether it’s the way residents of the Midfield trailer park have been treated, or people with inflated water bills have been dismissed or “whether it’s just getting a development permit for a deck, it’s callous,” Smith said. “That has to end. Calgarians expect better and I want to deliver better.”

Smith says of all the politicians he’s known, he most admired former premier Peter Lougheed for always being “thoughtful and respectful.”

While president of the PC Party, Smith points out he used to run meetings with 44 people and they’d get their business done in a timely and disciplined manner, something Nenshi has been criticized for.

City manager Jeff Fielding has said city council’s long meetings cost the city a lot in overtime pay and it’s been recommended a speaker, costing $170,000 per year, be hired to chair the meetings rather than the mayor. That, Smith says, won’t be needed if he wins the election Oct. 16.

In many ways, Smith is still planning on running into a burning building — even if it is just figuratively.