Liberal insider Rocco Rossi emerged as the crowd favourite by jestfully questioning the financial viability of plans for the $4.6 billion, city-spanning light-rail line in light of “the fiasco” that was the St. Clair right-of-way project.

Taking a swipe at fellow mayoral candidate and TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, he chided that those responsible for such a debacle shouldn’t be given the “keys to the kingdom” of Transit City:

“It’s kind of like a contractor coming to you and saying, ‘you know what, I’m going to do a $4,000 job for you, it’s gonna take three months,’ and it ends up costing $12,000 and taking six months. Then they come back and say, ‘don’t worry, I’ve learned a lot of lessons here, let me do this $800,000 extension to the back of your home,’” he told a 100-plus crowd of angry residents in the Richview Collegiate auditorium.

“I am not against mass transit, I am against mass incompetence.”

While Rossi took the opportunity Wednesday to call for a hold on Transit City plans to allow time for review, mayoral rivals Giambrone, George Smitherman, Giorgio Mammoliti and Sarah Thomson also took advantage of the chance – their first since filing for candidacy last month – to square off face-to-face on the controversial project.

Giambrone advocated to push forward on the Eglinton line, 33-km of light rail from Pearson International Airport to Kennedy Station due to begin construction this year, without delay. To put it off, he said, would be to risk its future – as happened in 1995 with the scrapping of the Eglinton West subway.

“I think if we spend any time going back and putting things on hold and reevaluating, we will be another 20 or 30 years before we actually get real rapid transit expansion,” he said, noting the possibility that, if put off until after the 2011 provincial election, a new government could come in and cut the project short.

“That is what happened in 1995 – the hole was filled in, and instead of building some 20-km plus of subway around the city of Toronto, they built five (kilometres)…We have to take action now. We need to move forward. Putting everything on review is not the right answer.”

In a crowd of many still uneasy about the noise, increased traffic, loss of green space and confusion the above-ground Eglinton line – with its series of left-turn prohibitions and U-turns – would bring to the community, Giambrone’s forceful approach was an unpopular one.

“Underground is where we want to be,” as one woman put it, emerged as the favoured resident solution. Taking up that cause as advocates were Mammoliti and Thomson, who both garnered cheers for supporting residents in their call for a subway.

“I think there’s an opportunity to revisit subways in some corridors – we absolutely must. And Eglinton Avenue is one of those corridors,” Mammoliti said.

But with a subway price tag projected at fives times that of the planned above-ground line ($250 million a kilometre versus $50 million a kilometre), both Smitherman and Transit City project manager Stephanie Rice said ridership projections are not high enough to justify a subway.

To warrant one, projected demand would need to be at about 10,000 passengers per hour, but ridership projections for the Eglinton line currently fall short by nearly half, at about 5,400 passengers an hour.

“I’m not one of those that believes the financial capacity is there to bury this line,” Smitherman said, to jeers from the crowd.

“A popular position in this room might be to say ‘no way’ to a surface LRT, but, practically speaking, those that propose to bury it are those that propose to kill it.”