In early 2016, Mayor John Tory and the city’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat made a tantalizing pitch: with the same $3.56-billion earmarked for a three-station subway extension in Scarborough, the city could instead extend the subway by just one stop and have enough money left over to expand the Eglinton Crosstown light rail line from Kennedy to U of T’s Scarborough campus.

Records obtained by the Star through freedom of information requests show that officials at the city and the Toronto Transit Commission felt they couldn’t guarantee the two-for-one price. Those typically responsible for verifying cost estimates were kept out of the loop until just days — or in some case hours — before the proposal was publicly unveiled.

The skeptics were right.

Within five months, the cost of the one-stop subway extension would swell to consume nearly all of the money budgeted for the original three-station configuration, leaving almost no funds for the promised LRT extension.

And even before that happened, even as the plan was endorsed by a majority of city councillors as a “peace in the land” solution to a growing political problem, one senior TTC official privately cautioned his colleagues against doing anything to legitimize what he saw as an “ill-conceived” idea.

“This wasn’t a transit plan, this was a sales job,” said Councillor Josh Matlow.

“It was a bait and switch, and the public was misled.”

Tory’s spokesperson told the Star that the mayor was relying on professional advice at the time, and still stands by the plan.

Keesmaat says she stands by what was promised at the time, based on the information they had then.

On Tuesday, Premier Doug Ford shocked councillors as the province’s plans to take over major transit projects already underway became clearer, including a return to the more expensive three-stop option just as city council is set to debate updated costs and schedule for the one-stop extension.

Those costs, city staff said Wednesday, now total $3.9 billion — hundreds of millions of dollars more than the city has budgeted to pay for it.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on replacing the failing Scarborough RT, which is plagued by breakdowns as it undergoes stopgap repairs to keep its aging equipment operating.

And the commuters who rely on the SRT today? They “could have had a seven-stop, rapid transit line operating (this year) if their elected politicians and top bureaucrats had put the people’s interest before their own,” Matlow said.

“Every Toronto resident deserves better transit and, importantly, they should be demanding answers.”

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Before the one-stop subway extension, there was the plan to replace the SRT with three subway stations.

The three-stop plan was approved by council under then-mayor Rob Ford in 2013, scrapping plans for a seven-stop LRT that was nearing construction and fully funded by the province. It was budgeted at $3.56 billion, combining money from the province and Ottawa with $910 million raised over several decades from Toronto homeowners. That budget was based on no design work being done and therefore had little grounding.

But as early as 2015, staff realized potential flooding issues would push the new subway stations deeper underground and costs above budget, according to an internal city planning memo from late 2016. There were also concerns that Tory’s promise to build new GO stations on the Stouffville line would cannibalize ridership from the three new stations.

So the city planning team started reviewing the transit plan for Scarborough.

Led by Keesmaat, it proposed eliminating two of the subway stations and ending the line at the Scarborough Town Centre, rather than on Sheppard Ave. By cutting those stations and tunnelling, Keesmaat believed the city would have enough money left from the original budget to fund an LRT extension along Eglinton Ave. E. to the University of Toronto’s eastern campus.

In October 2015, Keesmaat presented the plan to the mayor’s office, which saw it as a solution to cost and ridership problems. According to the city planning memo, it was also presented to the TTC’s then-chief executive officer, Andy Byford, and some of his senior staff. The memo noted “no feedback” was provided at that point, and that “city planning did not have access to detailed cost estimates.”

The plan was also “socialized with political stakeholders” between September and December 2015, the memo says.

John Campbell, who was then a new city councillor and TTC board member, remembers being shown a presentation on paper by Keesmaat.

“‘If we remove these stops, there’s going to be enough money ... to pay for the Eglinton LRT,’” he recalls Keesmaat saying.

“That was the selling point for me,” Campbell said. “They never should have presented that to us unless they had really hard numbers.”

Meanwhile, city staff were preparing a public report on the plan, which was set to be released on Jan. 21 for discussion at Tory’s executive committee a week later.

The Toronto Transit Commission often estimates costs for transit projects built by the city and, on Jan. 14, TTC officials discussed a request from then deputy city manager John Livey to assist with the new subway plan.

“I repeat my worry that, among other things, if/when we provide information on these matters, it will legitimize the ill-conceived proposal which is being pursued by city planning and, one way or the other, the word will be that the TTC endorses it,” wrote Mitch Stambler, who was the TTC’s head of strategy and planning.

“I sure don’t (want) my name associated with this stuff.”

The following day, TTC project manager Gary Carr outlined various unanswered questions in an email.

He concluded, “I see no way of city being able to get costing info on this concept by Jan. 28 regardless of who does the costing — too much discussion/assessment needed.”

One day before the report’s release, on Jan. 20, Keesmaat and staff from the mayor’s office gave a briefing to Star reporters.

Chris Eby, who was Tory’s chief of staff, said the plan meant more transit could be built for more people at “no additional cost, the same funding envelope.” He said city manager Peter Wallace would phrase it differently — that it was within the same “order of magnitude” — but Eby described that as being “within the ballpark” of the $3.56-billion budget.

Keesmaat described the funding in a similar manner, saying one more subway station and the Eglinton LRT extension could be built “within the same funding envelope” as the three-stop subway extension.

(There is a difference between “the same funding envelope” and “the same order of magnitude.” A “rough” order of magnitude estimate, as Wallace noted in one internal email, “is a factor of 10, literally” — in other words, up to 10 times as much.)

Both the mayor’s office and Keesmaat have said the numbers were verified in a third-party review by the U.S.-based engineering and consulting firm HDR.

According to city spokesperson Brad Ross, city staff sought “high-level advice” from HDR on the Eglinton LRT extension, “but the provided guidance was not based on design and was not a formal cost estimate.”

The city did not respond to a request from the Star to see what HDR reviewed and what it concluded.

On Jan. 20, at 3:07 p.m. — less than 24 hours before the city planning report was to be released — senior transportation planner Mike Logan asked the city’s financial staff to review the “financial impact” section of the report, which is typically meant to spell out how much recommendations from staff to council will cost.

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He apologized for the rush.

The request was forwarded to then-chief financial officer Rob Rossini, who responded with an email to then-deputy city manager John Livey. “John, Finance needs to be able to review reports of these magnitude well before the day before they go out,” Rossini wrote. “This is unacceptable.”

He also asked a key question: “What assurances do we have that the new plan costs the same as the old plan?”

Rossini also wanted to know how the planning department had estimated savings of $1 billion by eliminating two of the proposed subway stops.

Livey replied that “the sole purpose of this report is to get the idea into the public forum.”

The report, he said, “is not intended and expected to have a financial section with the normal due diligence that we normally do, because we are only tabling the idea for the start of a much longer investigation.”

Rossini persisted — it was by then after 8 p.m. — saying his staff would be asked about costs and responsible for answering.

“But more importantly,” he wrote, “my fear is we create an expectation that this can happen with no increase in costs, only to find 12 or 18 months later it’s another half a billion or a billion dollars.”

He referred to the ballooning costs of rebuilding and rehabilitating the Gardiner Expressway: “The original estimate we had was about $700 (million), now we’re up to $2.8 (billion).”

Livey said it was the city manager, Wallace, who “did not want us to get into the costs.”

The following day, Rossini pulled Wallace into the conversation, and the city manager acknowledged Keesmaat’s estimates were less than solid.

“We have only the rough estimates of equivalency from the chief planner, with little incremental substantiation. We agree on that,” Wallace wrote to Rossini and Livey. “Given this, I have asked that we not refer to the projects as costing the same and we not directly offer public assurances of this.

“The plan is better, but we do not yet have the information to speak confidently to costs.”

“Too late,” Rossini wrote as he watched Tory step in front of television cameras on the upper floor of the council chamber at city hall and say that both projects could be provided from “approximately the same funding envelope” as the original subway plan.

“I’m watching the press conference,” Rossini wrote, “and everyone is saying it will cost the same.”

Keesmaat made the same claim on Twitter that day: “The proposed optimization of transit planning for Scarborough results in more transit within the same funding envelope.”

At the executive committee meeting on Jan. 28, where the plan was presented publicly, Keesmaat said there had “been conversations” with both TTC and Metrolinx and while more work needed to be done, the “higher order of magnitude costs have indicated that we are within a similar range.”

TTC spokesperson Stuart Green says his organization was never asked to verify the claim that the two projects could be built at a similar cost to the original plan.

A leaked version of the draft report said the plan could be built “for a similar cost and in a similar time frame,” the Globe and Mail reported. In the publicly released final version, however, the words “order-of-magnitude” appear before the word “cost.”

The city spokesperson Ross noted in an email to the Star that the final report also said “a revised city funding strategy may be required.”

Neither Wallace nor Rossini said what was meant by “order-of-magnitude” estimates at the executive meeting. TTC officials were present at the meeting, but did not speak.

By June 2016 — five months later — the cost of the subway was quoted at $2.9 billion and then $3.2 billion, sucking up nearly all of the funds for Scarborough transit and effectively pricing out the promised LRT extension, which was estimated to cost at least $1.67 billion.

So why were assurances given that both projects could be done for $3.56-billion?

“Mayor Tory supported this plan based on the advice of our professional staff,” Tory spokesperson Don Peat said in an email. “We are getting on with building transit including the Bloor-Danforth subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre — that’s what Mayor Tory was elected and re-elected to do by Toronto voters.”

Keesmaat said in an email she was “flabbergasted” by the Star’s line of questioning, likening it to “conspiracy theories.”

She also said correspondence reviewed by the Star did not represent all the conversations that would have taken place about the transit plan, and that costing is “well within the domain of city planning.” Calling it a “sales job,” she said, “undermines the technical analysis that went into the creation of the plan.

“I continue to stand by what I said at the time was that the express subway was within the envelope of the order of magnitude costing,” she said. “The fact that this could be achieved within the order of magnitude funding envelope was verified by a third party in advance of us stating this in public.”

And yet, the estimate for the subway extension now stands a $3.9 billion, according to city staff, putting the cost of the two-for-one transit plan at just over $5.5 billion.

While technically within an “order of magnitude,” it’s almost $2 billion more than the city’s $3.56-billion “funding envelope.”

What’s more, even if the LRT extension is permanently stalled, it still leaves the city more than $300 million short of the price for a single new subway station.

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