Pedway plan no tunnel to love

Idea illustrates everything wrong with proposed Galleria project

A $40-million pedway to a glass-roofed plaza.

If you want an illustration of everything that’s wrong with the proposed Galleria arts campus in downtown Edmonton, you can find it in the special request that came before city council’s executive committee Tuesday.

The Galleria is a publicprivate partnership to build a 1,600-seat opera house, a 650-seat concert hall, two smaller theatres, a huge office tower, and classroom and studio space for two or three University of Alberta faculties.

At the centre of the complex? A heated outdoor public plaza roughly the size of Churchill Square, topped with a glazed roof.

The premise is for three levels of government and local philanthropists to provide the initial capital, with lease revenues to pay the mortgage and fuel an endowment fund.

Now the Edmonton Downtown Academic and Cultural Centre Foundation, the consortium behind the Galleria, says it urgently needs city funding to begin work on an 250-metre underground pedway, connecting the Galleria to the Royal Alberta Museum, City Hall, and the Churchill LRT station. Museum construction is underway; any pedway must be designed before the RAM gets much farther along.

The foundation says a pedway is vital because the U of A won’t agree to lease Galleria space without one.

Let’s take a deep breath. Sure, it makes sense to plan a pedway now and not try to retrofit one later. But the foundation doesn’t want any old pedway.

Its architectural teams “propose a much grander vision than is often associated with underground pedways,” reads the report to councillors.

That includes special “high value” finishes and moving sidewalks.

Esti mated cost? Between $25 million and $40 million.

Foundation spokesman Godfrey Huybregts is unapologetic.

“Part of the framework that the city approved last year was that the city would support the infrastructure for the pedway,” he says.

True, last summer, the previous council voted unanimously to support the Galleria project in principle. But it only agreed to fund the pedway to a maximum cost of $11 million, with funds from the second phase of the downtown arena community revitalization levy. The new proposal is far greater and comes sooner than anticipated.

Beyond the price and the time, a grand pedway seems antithetical to the city’s new planning philosophy. We’re supposed to be encouraging street life, not scuttling people underground.

Yet after an in-camera debate, executive committee voted to forward the foundation’s request for an immediate $5 million for tunnel-planning costs to a full council meeting March 26. The committee also voted forward a separate $15 million request, to help the foundation to assemble land for its project.

Mayor Don Iveson says that doesn’t mean the foundation’s wishes will be granted.

“Council is not going to build a $40-million underground tunnel. That was clear from the meeting.”

Iveson says it makes sense to extend the LRT concourse to connect with the Royal Alberta Museum, the way it does to the Art Gallery of Alberta.

But, he says, “council wasn’t interested in anything beyond a functional walkway.”

Executive committee member Scott McKeen isn’t even wild about that.

“I hate pedways. I think they steal vibrancy from the public realm. Busy sidewalks are what we need,” he says.

“The university made it very clear, though, that this was a deal breaker for them. We struggled with that as a committee, but the university was very adamant.”

Indeed it is. Provost Carl Amrhein insists climatecontrolled access is key to a successful campus — not just for music and art student transporting fragile instruments or supplies, but for visitors to the new campus’s galleries and recital halls.

But remember, the U of A hasn’t formally agreed to be an anchor tenant in the Galleria. The foundation has no confirmed anchor tenant for its proposed office tower. Nor has the province nor the federal government committed a penny.

Nor has there been much public debate about building and heating an outdoor civic plaza, when we already have trouble programming Churchill Square. Instead, there’s been private discussions, with the rest of us shut out of the conversation. That’s no way to build community support for a $900-million public project.

Let council consider funding a pedestrian link between the LRT and the RAM. That’s prudent planning. But approving a luxury tunnel to an unfunded project would be daft.

Iveson and his colleagues have cannily scheduled their Galleria vote after the provincial budget. By then, maybe they’ll know whether the foundation’s dream project is viable or fragile as glass.