London commercial real-estate expert George Georgopoulos is urging council to make its transit plans the subject of a referendum.

“I think it should be a civic vote,” he said Thursday after the city held a meeting with King Street merchants and residents to discuss how its bus rapid transit plans would affect that street. “Make it a vote. Put it all out there.”

If the project goes through, “the value of real estate . . . is going to be affected in a downward spiral,” he said. “It’s going to kill the downtown.”

Georgopoulos said he would rather see the money used for targeted infrastructure projects, such as tunnels or bridges at rail crossings on Adelaide Street and Richmond Streets.

“It’s almost like it’s been a secret,” he said of how council has communicated its plan. “It seems to me that this council doesn’t want us to drive cars.”

However, city officials who presided over the afternoon meeting — which drew about 40 people — portrayed the feedback they got as more a matter for fine-tuning than cause for a dramatic turnaround in the vein of what the veteran realtor is suggesting.

“This is the start of a conversation that maybe should have” begun earlier in the process, said Kelly Scherr, London’s top engineer. “It was a good, engaged discussion.”

The comments heard at the meeting will be handed over to the civic works committee next week.

There will be another gathering, for Richmond Street property owners, on Thursday.

After the meeting Coun. Tanya Park, whose Ward 13 includes King Street, said, “Everybody wants to know: What’s going to happen on the street?”

Any amendments to the city’s plans would create a ripple effect, she said. “If we change one thing, effectively four other projects change around it. There’s just so much going on.”

For her part, she was encouraged by the turnout.

City council has approved the BRT plan, though the exact corridors won’t get final approval until later this spring, possibly June. Two parts of the routes have proved especially contentious:

• King Street outside Bud­weiser Gardens could be turned into a single lane of eastbound vehicle traffic hemmed in by east- and westbound curb-side lanes exclusive to buses.

• A 900-metre tunnel under Richmond Row, with openings on Richmond Street near St. Joseph’s hospital and the northwest corner of Victoria Park.

City hall’s stake is roughly $130 million, much of that from development charges. The rest would have to come from Ottawa and Queen’s Park, neither of which have committed any funding yet.

danbrown@postmedia.com

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