It’s quite a place really – stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The exasperation of county councillors was palpable a week or two ago as word came out that a small culvert project was going to cost upwards of $700,000.
Demands from the Credit Valley Conservation authority jacked up the costs, according to our sources. These demands ultimately drive up engineering costs as staff at various organizations paddle reports back and forth until mutual satisfaction is achieved.
In the middle of these volleys are municipal officials trying their best to put a cost-effective strategy together for council to approve. It is folly to believe the current regimen is sustainable in the longer term and councillors have every right to be annoyed.
The party suffering the most from this way of doing business is the weary taxpayer. They get stuck paying the bill for projects inflated by cumbersome environmental legislation and, quite frankly, a system where publicly paid agencies have developed a knack for confounding their own purpose. Common sense seems to have no place in these discussions.
This pillaging of the public purse is not a recent phenomenon.
We recall a number of years ago quizzing the engineering firm handling the new Highway 7 proposal what it was like to graduate and work until retirement on the same job without any tangible results. The point wasn’t lost on anyone, but here we are over a decade later and still no conclusion. The public should be furious, but they too are unwittingly part of the problem.
The public psyche seems to have shifted from thriftiness to causing over-engineered projects that contemplate every environmental consideration over cost effective solutions. Protestors and vocal opponents of projects seem to get the lion’s share of consideration, while the silent majority’s hope for business-like solutions slips more and more into irrelevance.
A couple of weeks ago our office fielded a distressing call about a gravel storage site at Barbour Field in Hillsburgh. After minimal digging it turned out to actually be a good News story, where the Town of Erin had saved residents hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The critical resident seemed to know the material had been donated, but still had concerns about how the site was managed and encouraged some digging into the matter with the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of Environment. Neither organization (also funded by taxpayers) had an issue with Erin’s thrifty exercise.
We have no doubt that there was a bit of inconvenience for neighbouring residents. There was enough gravel hiked away from Hydro One’s construction lanes – for free – to greatly improve Erin’s pocketbook when it came to buying maintenance gravel. It is out-of-the-box thinking worthy of a “thanks” from residents, not a condemnation.
Eventually, when caught betwixt and between, leaders and people with ideas how to save public money or do better projects give up because the fight isn’t worth it.
We say keep trying.
