Brampton city councillors voted early Wednesday to reject a controversial transit project that would have seen an LRT route run along Main St. through the city’s downtown.

At about 1:30 a.m., council voted 7-4 to reject the Main St. plan that Queen’s Park had approved.

Cries of “shame” and promises of retribution rang out from the thinning crowd as furious residents filed out of the meeting.

Opponents had said the proposed corridor along the Main St. route lacked potential for ridership and future growth.

“It’s baffling to me that we are actually considering saying no,” Brampton resident Nikita Brown said before the decision, referring to the $300 million to $400 million that the province had earmarked for Brampton's share of the $1.6-billion Hurontario-Main LRT project.

Council’s decision means the LRT will now stop at Steeles Ave. instead of continuing north into downtown Brampton along Main St.

Almost 500 people had turned out earlier for the debate, which was held at the Rose Theatre to accommodate a crowd that couldn’t fit into Brampton City Hall's council chamber.

“I believe we made the best decision tonight to stop it at Steeles,” said Councillor John Sprovieri. The motion that passed, killing the Main St. route, allows Brampton to consider alternatives.

Sprovieri said a decision on an eventual LRT route, which council will now begin working on, should be ready in time to pick up construction when the project crosses Mississauga and gets to Steeles.

Councillors who opposed running the LRT up Main St. have proposed an alternate route along Steeles and then north to Queen St., where it could continue east from downtown to the Bramalea GO Train station. Some want it to run east on Queen all the way to the end of the Vaughan subway extension, which is currently under construction.

As the project now stands, the Hurontario LRT will run north-south through Mississauga along the city’s Hurontario spine, turning around at Steeles.

Mayor Linda Jeffrey, who had aggressively pushed the provincially approved Main St. route, was clearly exhausted when she met with reporters just before 2 a.m.

“It's been a long day,” she said. “I'm disappointed that this decision council made.”

She later released a statement, which read, “The decision of Council may very well have a long lasting impact on our relationship with other levels of government. I will continue to work with the province and (provincial transit agency) MetroLinx to provide the transit our city needs.”

In a surprise move, Jeffrey broke with her council allies on the issue when the decisive vote was called, supporting the motion that killed the Main St. plan, which she had championed for months. She later said her vote was to “make sure that we still have transit on the table.”

MetroLinx CEO Bruce McCuaig said the provincial money that would have funded the Brampton portion of the defeated LRT plan will now be available for other transit projects across the province.

But he made it clear that any alternative transit plan Brampton now decides on could still be considered by the province for funding. “That would have to be evaluated,” he told councillors.

Councillors said the decision now allows Brampton to approach both the province and the federal government to get the city’s “fair share” of transit funding. The approved Main St. route would have seen Brampton get only between a third and a quarter of the provincial funding that Mississauga will get for the project.

Only 5.6 kilometres of the proposed 23.2-kilometre Hurontario-Main route would have been in Brampton, while Mississauga –where council has approved that city's leg of the project – is guaranteed 17.6 kilometres.

Proponents said the province’s Main St. route would have finally revived the city’s struggling downtown core.

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Some opponents of the route, such as Gloria Berger, repeated the contention of several councillors, that the Main St. route simply did not have the potential ridership to support an LRT.

“The studies we have commissioned do not support an LRT through downtown Brampton,” Berger said, questioning why the city wasn't demanding that Queen's Park support a route that better suits the city.

She suggested Jeffrey, a former provincial Liberal cabinet minister, had been doing the bidding of the government she used to be a part of.

Jeffrey had warned repeatedly that turning down the Metrolinx-approved plan for the project would also mean taking any possibility of provincial funding off the table.

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