Portage and main is strictly a city issue.
There is no reason for the province to weigh in on issues outside of their jurisdiction.
Every inch of that rail yard will be a superfund site. Can you imagine all the stuff that’s been spilled over the last 150 odd years? Cleaning all that up is going to be a way bigger nightmare than the city thinks.
No doubt cleaning up a rail yard is a huge and expensive undertaking. However, it has been done successfully in Winnipeg before, albeit on a smaller scale. The Forks used to be a rail yard before being redeveloped into what it is now.
Couple that with the projected cost (almost certainly an underestimate), the fact that no government will want to pay for it, and that this country is basically two railroads in a trench coat.
One of them’s a billion-dollar boondoggle that will never happen, and the other is putting in a few crosswalks. I know which one I’d pick!
I’d pay an additional fee on my property taxes if it meant this could happen.
Feds chip in $500m, province chips in 250m, City taxes us an extra…$750 (someone else do the math, we’ve got like 300k homes in the city) over a few years and bam, we’re moving some tracks.
Lfg.
