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Chiarelli praised the city for moving an LRT maintenance and storage facility away from a controversial location off Woodroffe Avenue in his ward. The facility will be built off Moodie Drive instead.

The city also likes the idea of stretching the tracks to Moodie Drive to help serve the new Department of National Defence headquarters at the old Nortel campus.

Adding the Moodie Drive LRT extension is worth about $70 million. Adjustments to the track alignment in other parts of the plan have reduced the overall Stage 2 costs, such as aligning more of the eastern stretch into the median of Highway 174, saving $12 million.

Chris Swail, the director of O-Train planning, said the city took a close look at the budget to further compress the costs so the Moodie Drive portion could be added to the blueprint. The city hopes to see even more savings when it starts the procurement program for the construction work.

“That extension benefits us from a customer service perspective, it benefits us from an operations perspective in terms of providing us good additional maintenance and storage and because we had a little bit of slack in our estimates, we’re going to push ahead and see if we can squeeze it into the overall scope with the $3 billion,” Swail said.

John Manconi, general manager of transportation services, said bringing rail service closer to Kanata will mean more reliable transit service for people travelling by bus in mixed traffic downtown.