After decades of negotiations and sputtering hopes and then finally a land deal last fall, crews will begin constructing part of the southwest ring road as soon as next year, with $1.8 billion now budgeted for the project.

It won’t be enough to finish the project, and there’s no sense of when that will happen.

But in a budget that disappointed Calgary’s mayor for having little new for transit grants or other infrastructure, he was pleased to see money to finish the circle highway.

“Man, we’ve been working on this for 60 years. It was wonderful to see real numbers in the budget on that,” Nenshi told reporters.

The majority of the Calgary ring road dollars the 2014 budget pledged Thursday come between 2015 and 2017. Some of that will be spent on design work that remains incomplete, and $340.7 million will settle the long-awaited land deal with Tsuu T’ina First Nation, an agreement the federal government still must approve.

As it awaits Ottawa’s rubber stamp, Alberta Transportation will likely split the 41-kilometre project into two parts and begin work on the first one: the section between the Trans-Canada Highway and 69th Street S.W.

The province already owns that land and is close to being able to begin pursuing a project contractor for that west portion, Transportation Minister Wayne Drysdale said.

“I’m hoping, maybe not this year but next year we’ll start building on the part outside the reserve but even that takes three years,” he said in an interview.

The money budgeted Thursday for the ring road’s final quadrant is more than double what Alberta spent on the southeast leg. Drysdale said the southwest highway will cost more than $1.8 billion, but gave little hint as to how much more.

“It will be less than 10 billion and more than the 1.8, how’s that?”

Edmonton’s full ring, meanwhile, will be complete by 2016, budget documents state.

The Redford Tories gave little else in new money for the city’s transportation system. There was no increase to the Green Trip transit program, but pledged to ramp up spending after 2017 to meet the $2-billion Stelmach-era promise by the start of next decade.

Calgary is in line for about $167 million more in Green Trip, which is earmarked for a network of bus-only lanes.

On the Municipal Sustainability Initiative, Finance Minister Doug Horner heralded a $150-million boost to civic grants over three years. However, that grant fund has been delayed, and will only have paid out $7.6 billion to cities, towns and counties by 2016-2017, when communities were supposed to have received the full $11.3 billion pledged by former premier Ed Stelmach.

Municipal Affairs Minister Ken Hughes wouldn’t give a timeline for the rest of the MSI grants. That’s a problem for cities like Calgary, which borrowed money for projects like the west LRT on the assumption it would get all the money by 2016-2017, and has to spend more on interest costs because of the delayed cash flow.

“I would have loved it if they had committed to actually fulfilling their old promise on the MSI,” Nenshi said.

“We’ve got to get this right, and the increases that were announced today, while welcome, don’t even fulfil the original commitment, let alone creating actual new money for infrastructure.”