Reaffirm Hamilton’s LRT commitment

Doug Ford’s election promise is nothing more than a campaign pitch

Less than a week after confirming that a Progressive Conservative government would honour Hamilton’s light rail transit funding commitment, PC leader Doug Ford threw a grenade into the works when he went on to claim that if Hamilton doesn’t want LRT, we would still get the money for whatever we want.

First of all, let’s be serious. Ford as premier would be starting with a $2-billion hole in his budget after pledging to scrap his party’s proposed carbon tax, and he has promised to cut another $4 billion with no plan on where to find the savings.

No reasonable person thinks Ford will just cut Hamilton a cheque for a billion dollars with no strings attached.

The LRT funding is confirmed, committed, budgeted and being invested as Metrolinx acquires property. LRT is already underway, whereas Ford’s offer is an unbudgeted campaign pitch from a politician known for a casual relationship with the truth.

In any case, the best investment we can make for the long-term financial health of the city is to reaffirm our commitment to LRT.

Hamilton is in an infrastructure crisis. Every year, the city defers $200 million in necessary infrastructure maintenance we can’t afford.

Overall, we have more than $3 billion in deferred spending and we keep adding to it each year.

Even if we could apply the $1 billion directly to that backlog, it would do nothing to transform the fundamental driver that is causing us to rack up a backlog in the first place.

There is a very specific reason for the infrastructure crisis in Hamilton: we have more infrastructure than we can afford to maintain with our current tax base.

Hamilton has been building lowdensity, single-use suburban sprawl for decades.

That form of development requires vast expanses of road and kilometres of water, storm and sewer lines. People have to drive to get anywhere, increasing wear-and-tear on the roads.

Police, fire and ambulance also have to drive longer distances.

Historically, development charges have only covered 60 per cent of the infrastructure capital cost of new developments, and property taxes are not enough to cover maintenance and replacement.

We are expanding our liabilities faster than we’re expanding our tax base. Every time we add another sprawl subdivision, we dig the hole deeper.

We have four options to respond to this:

• Perform triage on the worst facilities and defer everything else;

• Liquidate public assets we can’t afford to maintain;

• Raise property tax rates;

• Grow the property tax base. Option 1 is unsustainable. Option 2 is likewise limited. If we sell off our civic buildings and parks, we lose the ability to provide basic municipal services. Option 3 is limited by the public’s willingness (and ability) to pay higher tax bills.

That leaves Option 4.

The only way to grow the tax base without also adding still more infrastructure we can’t afford is to add ratepayers by building upwards at higher densities on land that is already serviced.

The numbers are impressive. Take just one example: before 150 Main St. W. was redeveloped, the property paid $38,000 a year in property taxes.

Once it is completed, the estimated property tax will be $510,000 a year — a 13-times increase!

Now think of the huge potential to redevelop all the vacant buildings, gravel parking lots and empty spaces along the B-Line LRT corridor.

LRT provides a necessary catalyst for new transit-oriented developments that grow our tax base and bring in extra revenue without adding to our infrastructure burden.

Growing upward is the only way we can pull ourselves out of the infrastructure hole, and we need rapid transit to achieve that growth in order to accommodate so many new people and trips along a dense corridor.

In Waterloo Region, they calculated that the cost of not building LRT would be a lot higher than building it.

Their LRT hasn’t even begun service yet and they have already achieved more than $2 billion in new transit-oriented developments along the LRT corridor. Planning for LRT’s Phase 2 is already underway.

This kind of growth is exactly why Hamilton also pursued LRT funding. It is the centrepiece of our long-term growth strategy.

Our downtown core is already being transformed with major new projects, and developers cite LRT as a deciding factor.

Without LRT, we are a city adrift with no Plan B to get our finances in order.

Killing LRT now would send a devastating message to the world that Hamilton is a reckless and unreliable place to invest.

I can’t imagine a more negligent and atavistic betrayal of Hamilton’s potential than to squander this essential investment in our long-term financial health.

Ryan McGreal is the editor of Raise the Hammer (raisethehammer.org), a civic affairs website. He is also a member of Hamilton Light Rail (hamiltonlightrail.ca), a citizen group advocating for light rail transit.