Calgary city council voted Tuesday to wind down the long-sought Green Line project.

Council heard that the wind-down will cost $850 million on top of $1.3 billion already spent on setup costs that include land acquisition, bringing total expenses to $2.1 billion.

“That is a lot of money that has just been wasted,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek told reporters.

In other words, the messy light rapid-transit project has become messier. Future commercial real estate projects are caught in the political crossfire between the city, provincial government and Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi.

Premier Danielle Smith and Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen have accused Nenshi of botching the Green Line’s planning while he was Calgary’s mayor. Nenshi has responded by contending that Dreeshen turned the project into a political football and put jobs at risk.

“They lit $800 million on fire. Why? So they can insult me,” Nenshi told reporters Tuesday. 

The province pulled its $1.5-billion share of the project after initially endorsing but then opposing the city’s approved version of the Green Line. The city approved a revised version of the line that reduced the station count to seven from 13 while increasing cost to $6.2 billion from $5.5 billion.

“I don’t know why [the province] did this, but withdrawing the funding killed the project,” said Mayor Jyoti Gondek at a council meeting on Tuesday.

“There is no more Green Line as we’ve known it. There is no mandate for the [Green Line] board anymore as we know it. The thousand people that work on the Green Line project do not have a project to work on.”

Smith has engaged an engineering firm to come up with a revised route with a terminus at the future new entertainment centre in Victoria Park instead of downtown at the former Eau Claire Market site. Harvard Developments plans to develop multi-building mixed-use property around the former market site largely due to the city’s previous decision to build a station there.

Gondek chastised councillors who called for the city to pause the project and sort things out with the province. The mayor contended that the Green Line can only proceed if the province takes it on.

Council’s decision came after about 100 Calgarians held a rally at City Hall to save the project.

Pictured: Planned future development project around a previously proposed light rapid-transit station on the former Eau Claire Market site in downtown Calgary.

Rendering: Harvard Developments