Waterloo Region councillors approved the purchase of 14 light rail vehicles from Bombardier for $92 million Wednesday morning.
That purchase price is about $2.5 million less than the region had budgeted for the vehicles.
The only councillor to vote against the purchase was Waterloo Mayor Brenda Halloran, who said she’d rather see the money spent on social services.
“I look at the amount of dollars being used at this time to purchase these vehicles, and I’m concerned that we will not have enough funding to meet our obligations for next year,” Halloran tells CTV News.
The vehicles will each include 56 seats and capacity to hold more than 200 people.
A sample vehicle will be on display Saturday at regional headquarters on Frederick Street in Kitchener.
From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., visitors are able to enter the vehicle and have their photo taken in the driver’s seat.
Meanwhile, that $2.5 million in savings comes at the same time as councillors learned that renovations to a tunnel under the Conestoga Parkway between Homer Watson Boulevard and Courtland Avenue will cost $2.5 million more than projected.
“There’s just not enough room for the light rail plus the CN track in the tunnel that we have, so we have to build a new one,” says Thomas Schmidt, the region’s transportation commissioner.
Councillors were also addressed by Ted Livingston, a Waterloo resident and tech entrepreneur who urged them to scrap the project entirely.
“At first I thought it was cool, but as I started to dig in, I realized that trains aren’t going to solve any of our problems. They’re basically just glorified buses,” says Livingston.
“I realized that this is the first time that Waterloo could make a big mistake, that we could do something where we could look back and say ‘That was the first time we did something that wasn’t perfect.’”
Light rail transit vehicles will start running in Kitchener and Waterloo in 2017.
