Please, give up this idea of an LRT. Where will the money come from? We have an aging population in St. Albert because younger people cannot afford to buy here. The amount of people travelling into Edmonton for work and school is not large compared to our population. Ridership is less than two per cent of our St. Albert population. There is no way we could support an LRT with even triple the amount of those riding transit today.
The LRT is not an answer to anything. And I am sorry, the Amacon development isn't going to provide the ridership the LRT needs. This is a pipe dream that a society who thinks that they are entitled to everything wants. It is not practical for anyone. Why do people think that money grows on trees. Since when did people start thinking that it doesn't matter how much debt we get into because of the supposed social need? Too many of this generation who have grand ideas do not value being conscience of debt. Look at the Great Depression that my parents and grandparents went through. Today, we have a huge slowdown in Alberta with many people going bankrupt because of the debt they racked up. Yet we have some pushing for the LRT which will certainly become part of this great problem of debt.
Why would the people of St. Albert as a whole want this? The majority of residents will never use the LRT, or if they do, very few times. Maybe to go to a hockey game? For maybe a future cost of $100,000 to their property taxes to build an LRT? Pretty expensive game. The figure of $12,000 to build an LRT in the article in the Gazette is based on a per person basis if we have a population growth to 100,000 people. Today that figure would be $20,000 per person or about $100,000 per residence.
Let’s look at the facts. This grand idea of Edmonton has been a financial disaster. The City of Edmonton needs to double its ridership to even come close to breaking even. So how do they do that? They get the outlying communities to buy into the plan and cause those communities to go into debt even farther than themselves and still not solve the problem.
The cost to homeowners in this city would be $100,000 per home to build the LRT in today’s terms. Let’s look at this fact that the annual cost to an LRT pegged at $13 million today would cost each and every home in St. Albert $1,000 or more per year in property taxes, or more than 10 per cent of the city budget as of today for annual upkeep – this for a ridership of less than 1,000 people per day into Edmonton in today’s terms. So we would have over 10,000 homes paying $1,000 per year or more to pay for less than 1,000 people today travelling into Edmonton along with the $100,000 to build. And what benefit do the other 59,000 people in St. Albert today get for the $100,000 plus the $1,000 or more they will pay per year to support an LRT?
I personally do not want to take on this debt. I want to remain debt free and be able to live in comfort as I grow older. We aren’t New York City or Chicago or any of those big cities that have millions of people to support mass transit. We are St. Albert, a small city in the Prairies of Alberta, next to a city that thinks it is a major metropolis. You see, people like to think they are big and should have big plans. But jobs are moving away from Alberta and we aren't growing in population now. Our own government is now pushing the major industry of Alberta away and trying to get us to buy into alternative resources for energy. If we take away oil and gas, where are people going to become employed? Ridership into Edmonton, because of the downturn in oil and gas, is down. So I think the formula used to say the cost will be $12,000 per person is rather light as the figure will turn out to be much higher. But then, for some people, dreams are more important than reality. Their dream isn't my reality.
Ted Durham, St. Albert
