Does Wednesday night’s approval of GrandLinq as the consortium to design, build and operate the Ion light rail transit system mean an end to the fights over whether the project should move ahead?

It depends who you ask.

Jay Aissa, the owner of a Waterloo-based fencing company, has been fighting the project since last December.

He’s amassed more than 3,000 signatures on a petition against the transit project, and most recently attempted to block it in court.

Tuesday, a judge threw out his attempt to get an injunction against the project proceeding, but did not close the door on future legal action -- which Aissa says is coming.

 “I think we were rushing, trying to get our (case heard) before the vote,” he tells CTV News.

“We’re going to do our homework a little bit better. Whatever decision comes out of that, we’ll agree with it and we’ll go on with life.”

Aissa says he believes the real test for Ion will come on Oct. 27 – the date of the next municipal election.

But Kitchener Coun. Jim Wideman says he can’t say a new council, even one that doesn’t want LRT, scrapping the project by that point.

“That would be at their own peril, at a huge, huge cost,” he says.

“We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars that it would cost local taxpayers, with nothing to show for it.”

Visible signs of the project are in fact starting to pop up around Waterloo Region – although generally in low-traffic locations like a hydro corridor along Fairway Road in Kitchener.

Officials say work will become more prominent later this year, as GrandLinq starts surveying the route and begins construction a storage facility in north Waterloo.

More noticeable construction – the type that involves road closures and traffic disruptions – won’t commence until 2015.

The construction schedule is still being finalized, but it’s expected that road closures will be relatively short both in length and duration.

“As they move along, they will be opening streets. The closures will generally be in one-block areas,” says Thomas Schmidt, the region’s transportation commissioner.

One of the biggest disruptions will be on King Street in north Kitchener and south Waterloo, where the road will be opened up both to construct the system and to replace a decades-old sanitary sewer.

“People will see a very large hole … that’s not really needed for the light rail, but because we’re doing the light rail now, we need to do that sanitary sewer now as well,” says Schmidt.

The region expects to launch a website to provide advance notice of all Ion-related road closures.

The contract with GrandLinq has yet to be signed.

Wideman says he expects that to happen by mid-April, and Aissa says he hopes his case will be dealt with in court before that happens.

Ion is expected to start running along 19 kilometres of track through Kitchener and Waterloo in 2017.