City has wasted $2 Billion dollars in the last decade

[403Gemini]

http://www.newstalk770.com/2014/05/28/31072/

$7100 per household, ~281,000 homes = $1,995,100,000. This is only single detached homes too, not other various types of taxes we've been paying or people with other properties.

Lovely...

[ianmcc]

Sounds like someone is pushing for reduced expenses and the number one target is employee wages.
There are a couple of unions in contract negotiations right now.
Are you ready for a summer garbage strike?

[schocker]

Sounds about right for CoC

[ercchry]

i would have believed you if it was $2b in the last 2 years... $2b over 10 is stretching it...

[Cos]

.

[max_boost]

it's always easier to spend other people's money. it's almost normal to take longer, go over budget etc. and then just find ppl to blame along the way.

[Xtrema]

Well, you have to ask, why do they stop at 2001 and not further back?

Remember the 12 years of Duerr (City) and Klein (Province) where nothing is spent?

That increase is basically deferred responsibilities rear up its ugly head.

Now, while some spending by Bronco was legit, most are wastes too, especially west LRT which just cash Bronco out as he got properties along the way.

[speedog]

Originally posted by Xtrema
Well, you have to ask, why do they stop at 2001 and not further back?

Remember the 12 years of Duerr (City) and Klein (Province) where nothing is spent?

That increase is basically deferred responsibilities rear up its ugly head.

Now, while some spending by Bronco was legit, most are wastes too, especially west LRT which just cash Bronco out as he got properties along the way.

Ooh Xtrema - I'll applaud you for mentioning that sacred cow (Klein) in a negative light.

[Tik-Tok]

Originally posted by Xtrema
Well, you have to ask, why do they stop at 2001 and not further back?

Remember the 12 years of Duerr (City) and Klein (Province) where nothing is spent?

That increase is basically deferred responsibilities rear up its ugly head.

Now, while some spending by Bronco was legit, most are wastes too, especially west LRT which just cash Bronco out as he got properties along the way.

That was my thought. A lot of money was spent just to play catch up from years of no advancement in infrastructure, unfortunately they got used to spending money and didn't stop.

Originally posted by speedog


Ooh Xtrema - I'll applaud you for mentioning that sacred cow (Klein) in a negative light.

The guy was decent, but also an idiot. Who the fuck starves themselves just to pay off a near zero percent interest debt?

[revelations]

Complete junk article - while I agree that the CoC could use some trimming, to state that 100% of the 2 billion dollars was "wasted" simply because the CoC spending was out of line with growth - is complete horseshit.

Reasons, as mentioned above, no doubt contribute to short term (5-10 year) spending anomalies.

[J-D]

Based on any discussion I've ever had with a city employee, I'm not overly surprised.

The City of Calgary pays pretty well with excellent benefits and is chock full of middle managers... With compensation based almost solely on seniority.

[jwslam]

At least some of it was reasonable wasn't it?
I mean we're living in a city where 50 years ago they estimated a population of 600k and it's built that way (I can't find that thread, probably using the wrong keywords). There's so much infrastructure that needs to go in and it's definitely not proportional to the growth when you look at us growing laterally instead of up

[sneek]

Originally posted by J-D
Based on any discussion I've ever had with a city employee, I'm not overly surprised.

The City of Calgary pays pretty well with excellent benefits and is chock full of middle managers... With compensation based almost solely on seniority.

Let's be honest here, doesn't that describe most companies downtown? I might believe that the city promotes more on seniority, but do we really expect the public sector to run a leaner org chart than the private sector? I don't work for the city, but I did work for a private sector company of 50,000 and ~10,000 of them were VP's

[403Gemini]

Originally posted by jwslam
At least some of it was reasonable wasn't it?
I mean we're living in a city where 50 years ago they estimated a population of 600k and it's built that way (I can't find that thread, probably using the wrong keywords). There's so much infrastructure that needs to go in and it's definitely not proportional to the growth when you look at us growing laterally instead of up

The frustratrating part is instead of increasing our vehicle infrastructure, they're stripping it away with bike lanes and talks of making some downtown roads two way instead of one way (because one way is tough to figure out or some shit?)

Also I hate to bring up the Art argument, but we're buying so much random shit art it's like we're hillbillies who ran into loads of money and going on our first shopping trip to IKEA and just buying shit off the shelf. A lot of the "art" around calgary has so little to actually do with our city. It's bad when the stuff I like the most is the ironically placed shes under the macleod overpass when you're on glenmore and also the mountain darker tiles/concrete when you're cruising around stoney and see them on the overpasses.

What the flying fuck does the peace bridge, big blue cock ring have to do with our city? I'm sure there is some bullshit reason it's "tied to calgary" ("The traveling light" to reflect on Stoney Trail - GUESS WHAT! STONEY ISN'T DONE YET SO HOW CAN WE HAVE A CIRCLE!) but it's just bullshit.

[CapnCrunch]

Originally posted by 403Gemini


The frustratrating part is instead of increasing our vehicle infrastructure, they're stripping it away with bike lanes and talks of making some downtown roads two way instead of one way (because one way is tough to figure out or some shit?)

Don't worry, they're alleviating traffic by building condos and increasing single family lot densities in the outskirt suburbs. That should fix the problem.

[Darkane]

$7100 isn't even a whole weekend of premium hookers and blow.

Big deal. Aren't we all millionaires here?

[suntan]

Originally posted by sneek


Let's be honest here, doesn't that describe most companies downtown? I might believe that the city promotes more on seniority, but do we really expect the public sector to run a leaner org chart than the private sector? I don't work for the city, but I did work for a private sector company of 50,000 and ~10,000 of them were VP's

I worked for a company that had around 10K employees, there were 53 VPs when I left. That number got trimmed to around 13 after they got taken over.

My wife works for Shell and they punted quite a few VPs and managers a while back.

[403Gemini]

A lot of companies have trimmed the fat. One of the companies I worked at a few years back recently trimmed off about 40% of the management. Seems like other companies are understanding the need for people to do essential tasks instead of having tedious positions that can be handled by just 1 person

[HiTempguy1]

Originally posted by Cos
So lets over spend on useless shit we dont need, yet lets cut the front desk girl, or the permit departments wages or staffing levels to compensate for it.

This is how any government job is, but we've had this discussion before in other threads.

In short, because government/city employees typically have a union backing them (unless they are professional staff), they don't have to take it up the ass as often. The unfortunate side effect of this is that unions gave up significant rights/privileges they used to possess years ago, and now it is coming back to haunt "us". And since we gave those things up, the employer can now run willy-nilly over us, scapegoating people like the front desk girl or the permit department wages as reason for the excess spending.

Our charge-out rate for doing private industry work is absurd. And then we recently found out the company was charging DOUBLE our charge out rate when we were working overtime Typical government management.

[Hakkola]

Originally posted by 403Gemini
[B]
What the flying fuck does the peace bridge, big blue cock ring have to do with our city? /B]

I agree with most of what you said but I think the peace bridge was a good investment, it sees lots of traffic and I think it looks pretty awesome.

If you want to have a world class city you need that sort of stuff.