City, NCC to provide western LRT update

The 100-day truce between the City of Ottawa and the National Capital Commission appears to have ended with a compromise agreement on the controversial portion of the western extension of light rail.

The details are expected to be revealed Friday morning at a joint press conference downtown.

But sources close to the file told the Citizen late Thursday that some type of compromise had been reached and that the two sides have been working co-operatively for the past three months.

Officials from both the city and NCC have been tight-lipped about developments on the file since Mayor Jim Watson and former Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird met at the end of November and agreed to stop bickering about the matter publicly.

Baird has since resigned from his position and Nepean-Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre has been named the new minister responsible for the NCC.

Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper said he expected to be briefed on the latest developments before the 10:30 a.m. news conference. The section of proposed rail is located in his ward.

“It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if they found a compromise,” he said, adding the negotiations between the two organizations have been confidential.

“What I think this discussion has been about is how much of the route do they need to bury and how deep in order to satisfy the NCC conditions, and I expect to hear (on Friday) whether they’ve been able to arrive at that compromise,” Leiper said.

The councillor said the “ideal outcome” for him would be a full burial of the tunnel along the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway. But, he added, such a measure would likely impose costs on the city.

A fully buried tunnel would not impact green space, or impede access to the Ottawa River, and reflects a similar position expressed by the NCC board last fall, Leiper said.

The NCC said then that it supports the city’s western light-rail transit project, but the two sides have remained at odds over the 1.2-kilometre section of the proposed $980-million Richmond Underground line that would cross NCC land along the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway.

The city wants to run the line through a trench, 700 metres of which would be partly covered. But the NCC board declared in November that it would not approve the line unless it allowed unimpeded access to the Ottawa River shoreline and has a “minimal visual impact” on the parkway corridor landscape.

The city says it can’t afford a tunnel along the river, nor is it willing to support surface rail along Richmond Road or the Byron Linear Park.