When the Copper Review Commission convenes in the Municipal Chamber on Monday morning, it will be the first time in living memory that Ida Pryce and Aldric Voss have sat on the same side of a table.

This is not a figure of speech. The two council members, who represent opposing poles of Bobington’s political life — Pryce the Docklands moderniser who spent eight years championing the Veridan Corridor tramway, Voss the fiscal conservative who warned from the beginning that the project would consume resources better spent on schools and fire brigades — will share the commission’s raised bench, co-equal in authority, jointly responsible for a recommendation that could define the city’s direction for a generation.

“It is either inspired or catastrophic,” Council Speaker Desmond Falk said when the pairing was announced on Wednesday. Four days later, neither adjective has been eliminated.

The Numbers

The commission inherits a problem that has grown worse with each passing day. Copper futures closed Friday at 886 florins per tonne on the Bramblegate Exchange. When the City Council approved the Veridan Corridor expansion on the fifteenth of February — six days and what feels like six months ago — the tramway’s budget assumed a baseline copper price of 740 florins per tonne, with 380 million florins allocated for copper components across the project’s estimated 12,000-tonne requirement.

At 886, the copper component alone has swollen by approximately 490 million florins. By the time the commission delivers its report on the fifth of March, if prices continue on their current trajectory, the figure could exceed 500 million.

The Municipal Treasury’s capital contingency reserve stands at 142 million florins — a fraction of the shortfall. The city can borrow, but Deputy Treasurer Annabel Whitford warned on Wednesday that the municipal credit rating assumes on-budget delivery. Borrowing half a billion to cover a commodity overrun before a single rail has been laid is, as Whitford put it with characteristic understatement, “not a message that reassures creditors.”

The Three Options

Chief Transit Engineer Yara Okonkwo laid out the commission’s menu at Wednesday’s emergency session, and it contains no appetising items.

Option One: Proceed. Absorb the overrun through municipal bonds, at an estimated cost of approximately 28 million florins per year in debt service over twenty years. This preserves the project’s timeline — Phase 1 groundbreaking in autumn 2026, full completion by spring 2030 — and delivers the system as designed: fourteen miles of modern tramway, twelve stations, capacity for the city’s growth. The cost is fiscal pain measured in decades.

Option Two: Redesign. Substitute aluminium for copper in approximately thirty per cent of the project’s electrical systems. This reduces the copper requirement and the overrun but introduces an eighteen-month delay, degrades the system’s performance and longevity, and requires Okonkwo’s team to essentially re-engineer what they have spent years designing. Okonkwo made no effort to conceal her view that this option produces an inferior system. “You can build a bridge out of wood,” she said. “I would not recommend driving heavy vehicles across it.”

Option Three: Phase. Build Phase 1 only — the Docklands-to-Midtown segment — and defer Phase 2 (Midtown to Upper Fernwich) until copper prices stabilise, which could mean two to three years. This limits immediate exposure but delivers half a tramway and, in Pryce’s words, “breaks a promise to half the city.”

There is, technically, a fourth option that no one wishes to speak aloud: cancellation. The termination penalties alone would cost approximately 180 million florins — nearly the full contingency reserve — with nothing built and nothing to show for it.

The Witnesses

Monday’s session is expected to hear from three principal witnesses:

Yara Okonkwo will present a detailed technical assessment of each option, including updated cost projections at current copper prices. Okonkwo, who studied tramway systems in Verlaine, Port Caravel, and the Ashford Republic before designing the Veridan Corridor, is widely regarded as the most technically authoritative voice in the conversation.

Annabel Whitford will present the Treasury’s fiscal analysis, including borrowing capacity, credit implications, and the impact of each option on the city’s broader financial position.

Nils Haversten, chairman of the Miners’ Cooperative of Greymoor, has been invited to testify on the feasibility of increasing domestic copper production. The Greymoor mines currently produce approximately 2,000 tonnes per year — a fraction of the tramway’s 12,000-tonne requirement. Scaling up would take eighteen to twenty-four months and tens of millions in investment, with no guarantee that Greymoor copper could match the quality specifications of the tramway’s electrical systems.

The commission has also received written submissions from the Merchants’ Guild, the Docklands Workers’ Association, and the Bobington Historical Preservation Society.

The Politics

The Pryce-Voss dynamic will be the session’s subtext. Pryce cannot afford a recommendation that kills the project she has championed for nearly a decade. Voss cannot afford a recommendation that plunges the city into decades of debt for a project he opposed from the start. Both must produce a joint recommendation in nine days.

Mayor Blackthorne, who navigated Wednesday’s session with what this correspondent described as “measured resolve,” has been conspicuously absent from public commentary since the commission was established. Her silence may be strategic — why spend political capital before the commission reports? — or it may simply reflect the fact that there is nothing useful to say until the numbers are clearer.

Patrick Seldon’s Docklands Workers’ Association, which sent thirty workers to Wednesday’s public gallery, has indicated that it will attend Monday’s hearing in force. Seldon’s concern is less about which option prevails and more about what protections will be afforded to the 6,000 workers expected at peak construction — regardless of whether that construction covers fourteen miles or seven.

The hearing begins at nine o’clock. The public gallery holds two hundred and forty seats. Queuing is expected.