Sprung Structures: Trust, Money Lost Again: THE VOTER
Well, if you’re wondering about the high cost of eggs this week, you need look no further than the city.
It’s the result of the large number of sprung shelter proponents and supporters now left with egg on their faces.
The question now arises about the sunk costs of this ridiculous venture. “Sunk costs” are the investments made in something that you can’t recover and would include:
- staff resources such as staff time, materials, etc.;
- pre-construction costs such as surveying the land, environmental assessments, etc.
- consultation costs including bringing people in to explain the shelters to staff, councillors and residents;
- costs to promote the project outside of city hall;
- the cost of preparing and running a bidding process, fair or otherwise;
- any fines or penalties that may become due if the city has entered into any contracts with for any part of the work that isn’t going to be fulfilled … think LRT and Siemens here;
- and, of course, the myriad items I haven’t listed.
I’m not sure if the city’s reputation can be counted since, to be a sunk cost, it would have to exist in the first place. Certainly, we’ve seen the community’s reaction to certain councillors and the mayor go even further downhill but that’s hard to value.
Without a doubt, the city lost a lot of goodwill among local contractors when it attempted to sole-source the contract to build the shelters to an out-of-town firm saying nobody local had the experience in building such structures. The city had to do an embarrassing about-face and pretend to open up a procurement process but gave local firms an almost impossibly short turnaround time to get a proposal in.
It might be one thing if you could believe that there would be “lessons learned” from this whole exercise but, looking at the city’s track record, that’s unlikely.
Another day, another few barrels of taxpayers’ money into the pit.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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The memo from Kale Brown , the manager who heads the housing department actually gave me hope . His department is actually using evidence to make a decision.
Note that the City Manager and Mayor let the middle level public servant announce the change.
It appears that the only thing elected officials are good at…….stupid ideas, that cost alot of money, that don’t work, and then leave taxpayers’ to pay for the mess.
Meanwhile. these same elected individuals suffer no punishment and skip off with huge indexed pensions.
Voter. Thanks for the comprehensive, well-written notes. I would question point number 3, “consultation costs including bringing people in to explain the shelters to staff, councilors and residents”. It is my experience that the city rarely seeks (or better yet, listens to) consultants unless it feels its final choice will be questioned and has need of a potential fall guy to point its collective finger at.
Sisco,
Sorry, that wasn’t as clear as it could have been.
I was referring to the costs of running community consultations such as the fiasco they put on at the Nepean Sportsplex as well as providing blurbs for councillors to use in their communities when talking to constituents about the shelters. The Sportsplex event was more egregious than usual because they wouldn’t respond to questions during the main part of the meeting but sent people off to get their questions answered one-on-one from “experts”, some of whom didn’t have the answers.
They did also have the outside consultants of the type you’re referring to who were used as a deflection method to shield the City from having to step up to the plate.