Smith throws in lot with anti-BRT group Ready to Engage
Mayoral candidate Bill Smith stood shoulder to shoulder with with a group bitterly opposed to the southwest BRT on Sunday—even as he attempted to distance his campaign from that same group, Ready to Engage, saying the two are not connected.
Two people who have acted as Ready to Engage spokespeople in the past, ex-journalist Rick Donkers and longtime provincial PC campaigner Alan Hallman, are working as organizers on the campaign of Smith, a former PC president.
At the joint media conference, held by the Smith campaign and Ready to Engage, Smith said it’s incorrect to infer “that because I have people that are working on my campaign from the BRT group, that in some way there’s a connection there. There’s not.”
Ready to Engage formed to fight the planned rapid-transit line that will run from downtown Calgary to Woodbine, including bus-only lanes on 14 Street S.W. The 22-km BRT route is anticipated to be a key transportation link to southwest destinations including Mount Royal University, but also passes by affluent homeowners in neighbourhoods such as Eagle Ridge.
Construction is set to begin in 2018.
The fight over the SW BRT has been exceptionally nasty, of a tenor foreign to most civic debates in Calgary. The city shut down in-person open houses earlier this year amid allegations of aggression and threats toward city staff.
Ready to Engage has raised concerns about how the new bus route will affect residents, citing everything from loss of green space to traffic to noise from the new buses. They describe the city consultation process as a sham.
“Like the people at Midfield Park, they’ve been treated callously,” said Smith, referring to the northeast trailer park where low-income Calgarians have been forced out of their homes by the city.
But Lakeview resident Jesse Salus said not only have there been years of consultation on the SW BRT — as a resident, he’s already seen his feedback incorporated. He says he first got a flyer for the SW BRT sessions six years ago, and wrote to the project manager suggesting a change.
The original plan had the BRT going southbound-Crowchild to eastbound-Glenmore on the flyover, which gets badly congested at peak times. Salus suggested a new bus-only lane just south of that interchange in Lakeview, so buses could bypass the congestion.
It’s now part of the plan.
“These improvements that were added after the original budget is part of why the budget is increasing, but in return we get a much better product,” said Salus, referring to the project’s cost estimate increasing from $40 million to $65.6 million last year. “I’m surprised when people say there was no consultation when a private citizen like me can have such a positive impact on the project.”
“Don’t think for a minute that there wasn’t engagement.”
Ready to Engage is calling on the project to be put on hold until after the southwest portion of the ring road is completed (currently slated for 2021). Smith said he’d halt the BRT project if elected.
“Calgarians should be outraged,” said Ready to Engage spokesperson Doug Fraser, standing beside Smith. “The southwest BRT is simply a thinly-veiled approach to introduce unwanted, high-density development into our southwest communities.”
Pressed by reporters at the Ready to Engage event on Sunday, Smith said he would not release his campaign donors before Election Day as incumbent candidate Naheed Nenshi did last week, calling on Smith to do the same. “Transparency is following the rules,” Smith said. “And this has just been a spin by Nenshi in the last week to distract from his egregious record being a mayor in the last seven years.”
Shifrah Gadamsetti, president of the Students’ Association of Mount Royal University, called on Smith to be forthcoming about who’s funding his campaign.
“It’s becoming an increasingly concerning conversation for us, knowing that perhaps there are niche stakeholder groups funding certain candidates,” said Gadamsetti, who is also part of the Calgarians for BRT group.
Gadamsetti noted that there’s a lot of misinformation flying around about the BRT project, and said the public conversation needs to be broader.
“A lot of the conversation right now is focused on singular communities and singular situations,” she said. “We want to bring people into the broader conversation on how this BRT network is going to serve all Calgarians — and how beneficial it can be.”
Gadamsetti said the SW BRT is especially important to the 12,000-plus students of MRU, along with faculty and staff. “All of these people want an efficient way to get to work and go home and engage with their social life and their quality of life,” Gadamsetti said. “And they can’t do that currently because parking is incredibly expensive and transit is incredibly inefficient.”
“We’re really excited to see this project move forward.”
—Jeremy Klaszus
