The cost of renting and erecting a 3,000-square-metre dome over King Street in Kitchener will be more than $1 million, one regional councillor says – and that’s just the starting point.
Coun. Tom Galloway, the chair of Waterloo Region’s planning and works committee, said Friday that the known cost of the dome is “over a million dollars.”
That figure doesn’t include the amount of money that will be spent heating the dome, which is dependent on how the winter plays out weather-wise, and on how fast the work can be done underneath.
“We hope it to be less than $2 million – by quite a bit,” Galloway said.
However much the dome costs, it’s not clear who will be paying for it.
GrandLinq, the group of companies responsible for building and operating the Ion light rail transit system, and the region are in the midst of talks about which of them will foot the bill.
According to Thomas Schmidt, the region’s commissioner of transportation and environmental services, the key issue is figuring out whose actions caused the delay that prompted crews to move to winter construction.
“Normally in this type of situation, GrandLinq would want the delay to be a regional delay. From our perspective, we would see it as a GrandLinq delay,” Schmidt said Friday.
If part or all of the cost is billed to the region, both Galloway and Schmidt say a contingency fund within the $818-million budget for the LRT project will be more than enough to cover it.
The contingency fund was initially pegged at $12 million, Schmidt said, but has increased as other parts of the project have come in under-budget.
Once the dome is constructed – which is still a few weeks away – crews will work underneath its vinyl exterior to build retaining walls and a new rail bridge.
The full project in the area involves building a new, lower King Street, with train tracks passing above it.
King has been closed to all forms of traffic between Victoria Street and Moore Avenue since early 2015, and will remain so until the heaviest construction is done – something officials say they hope to have complete by the end of 2016.
