King-Victoria Transit Hub

[ijmorlan]

Region cobbling together funding for Kitchener transit hub.

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...t-hub.html

Looks like the Record is talking about funding for $106 Million ....Years ago...I was under the impression that the Province was paying for $40 million and that was to cover the cost. I was also under the impression that the RFP stated that Ball Construction was too expensive...It rather stranger that $106 Million is Ok now.

Honestly, this is looking like a pretty serious quagmire.

I don't like the design, so I'm a little biased obviously, but we're spending over a 100 million on....almost nothing, a bus loop, waiting building, plaza, way way over budget.

This boggles the mind, is nobody questioning this?

How much does it cost to build a building like, say, the six storey office building beside the TD.  That's a high end building, but vastly more ambitious than our transit station. Is it seriously an order of magnitude more than 100 million?

The Quantum-Nano Centre at the University of Waterloo was $100 million. That included digging down 10m to a solid clay base and all sorts of special facilities for clean rooms mechanically isolated from the rest of the building.

There is something wrong if $100 million doesn’t buy a nice train station (with a cover over the tracks, no excuses, given that they built one temporarily just to work on the bridge), integrated with a big enough commercial and residential building to cover the mortgage payments.

And I will say that if a private developer had bought that site, there is no way they couldn’t find something to put on it which would throw off enough profit to easily pay for a train station. The Region has the additional advantage of being able to put the train station on the site themselves, which further increases the value. The site really should be the location of the first 60 story building in the Region, and I’m really not interested at all in hearing any BS about how it shadows nearby residential neighbourhoods for 5 minutes out of the day, or how the existing official plan doesn’t allow for such.