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No early cash for Sheppard, province tells Ford
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The Toronto Star-
Ontario’s new transportation minister says Mayor Rob Ford will not get an advance on potential provincial funding for the city’s privately financed Sheppard line.
Bob Chiarelli told reporters after a media event marking the start of construction on the Eglinton-Crosstown line that, while Ford has received no formal response to his request for an advance on any surplus dollars from that provincial megaproject, the answer is no.
“We’re certainly working to be under budget and we’re certainly going to honour that commitment if the money is there,” Chiarelli said Wednesday. “But we can’t give an answer now — we can’t advance money now on an amount that’s unknown.”
The news prompted Joe Mihevc, a Ford foe and former TTC vice-chair, to say in an interview: “I think that the Sheppard subway is dead.”
After Ford unilaterally scrapped plans for the provincially funded Transit City light rail network, he got the province to agree to bury most of the Eglinton line while, he said, the city would fulfill his campaign promise to extend the Sheppard subway to Scarborough Town Centre.
In August, amid talk he was having trouble finding private investors to help build Sheppard, Ford went to Queen’s Park asking Premier Dalton McGuinty for early delivery on an agreement that the city would get up to $650 million from any Eglinton surplus.
“There could end up being zero, or there could end up being $650 million,” Chiarelli said, adding that won’t be known “until some time from now.”
In fact, the province is privately estimating a $200 million surplus that could be eroded by challenges such as traversing the Don Valley. That figure has been shared with the city.
Gordon Chong, tasked by Ford to draft a financing plan for the $4.7 billion Sheppard line, told the Star his report next month will advocate building it “in phases, opening each new station as we’re ready.”
Ford’s office is privately expressing confidence the Sheppard line will be built and that the provincial surplus will materialize.
But Mihevc said the lack of government funding now, to stimulate investor interest in public-private partnerships, is likely to prove fatal to the project.
“All signs point to Sheppard being dead — D-E-A-D, dead — and I think the only thing that hasn’t happened is the news becoming public.”
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