The working group met on Wednesday the 16th, in the Deputy Treasurer’s office on the second floor of the Municipal Treasury, which overlooks Caldecott Square and which, on a clear morning, offers a view of the tramway route that will one day — if all goes according to a plan that has been revised more times than any plan ought to be — carry passengers past the window.

The vote was unanimous. Holt’s recommendation — forward contracts for approximately sixty percent of Phase 1’s copper requirement, roughly 3,120 tonnes of the 5,200-tonne total — was endorsed without amendment. Deputy Treasurer Annabel Whitford signed the authorisation. The Bobington Exchange was instructed to begin executing contracts.

The first tranche was completed on Friday: approximately 1,200 tonnes at 648 florins per tonne. The second tranche, a further 1,000 tonnes, is expected this week. The remaining 920 tonnes will be contracted over the next fortnight, at whatever price the market offers on the day.

As of Monday’s close, that price is 638 florins per tonne — the thirty-eighth consecutive daily decline and the lowest level since late November. Copper has fallen from 889 at the height of the Kaelmar crisis to 638 today. That is a decline of twenty-eight percent over approximately eight weeks. In commodity terms, this is not a correction. It is a reckoning.

The blended cost of the hedged portion, assuming completion at or near current levels, will be approximately 645 florins per tonne. The bond prospectus was written with a baseline of 740. The difference, over 3,120 tonnes, is approximately 296,000 florins — not a transformative saving, but a signal. The Continental Rating Agency’s “Satisfactory, Conditional” rating required a hedging strategy within sixty days. The strategy has been delivered in forty-five.

Holt, reached at her offices on Guildhall Terrace, was characteristically restrained.

“I do not celebrate at 648,” she said. “I will not celebrate at 600. I will celebrate when the first tram runs and the books balance.”

The remaining forty percent of Phase 1 copper — approximately 2,080 tonnes — will be purchased on the spot market in quarterly tranches over the construction period. This exposes the city to price volatility on the balance, which Holt’s memorandum describes as “an acceptable risk, given the current trajectory and the cost of over-hedging at any single price point.”

Four of six financial institutions have now submitted formal expressions of interest for the bond. The formal offering remains on track for May. The most expensive page in the prospectus — the one that carried the rating — is no longer blank. The second most expensive page — the one that carried the hedging strategy — is no longer theoretical.

What remains is execution. Phase 1 breaks ground in autumn. The copper will arrive by ship, by rail, and — if Haversten’s Miners’ Cooperative achieves its modest expansion targets — by cart from the Greymoor Highlands. The price at which it arrives will depend, as prices always do, on things that Prudence Holt is the first to acknowledge she cannot predict.

But 648 florins per tonne, in April 2026, is a price at which a tramway can be built. And certainty, as Holt’s memorandum observed, has a value that the spot market does not.