City Ignored Oversight With Light Rail: TWEEP
Out of the mouths of tweeps hast thou ordained strength.
Rather biblical (apologies to God for amending his book), but in this case, absolutely true.
Former Citizen colleague Jeff Pappone gets the crux of the light-rail problem and it has nothing to do with wheel hubs and bearings:
When council doesn’t give a damn about oversight and let’s staffers have their heads, it’s call noversight.
And you get the mishandling of $2.2 billion.
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Looked at the situation in a different way. Who amongst Watson, Manconi, Kanalakos, Hubley and the rest of the council of the day was/is expert on rail of any type let alone designed for Ottawa, the new Alstrom configuration? Yet these players decided contracts, held information from the public, fabricated stories, and generally played the citizens for fools, while WASTING BILLIONS
Bruce:
When you’ve a big technical project that is really important, I’ve seen councillors put together their budgets to hire an expert to look at the deal, specs etc.
Nobody did that. In fact, they signed over responsibility to staff.
So that council was not only incompetent, it was lazy.
cheers
kgray
Looking forward, we have a council and City Staff totally conditioned to the Watson system of governing, where independent thinking on Council was totally stifled. The question is how to get Council to effectively resume it’s oversight role and restore a functional corporate culture at City Hall.
Agee with your article and follow up comments. I see it as an everyday thing that politicians think we won’t notice.