Previous Issues
Getting it right
?The restraint of those in the Council Chambers last Wednesday morning, as the Region of Durham’s project manager for the Brock Street reconstruction, James Garland, presented his latest update, was remarkable to behold. But perhaps there was too much restraint. Maybe if a few of the merchants had blown their stacks and shown him how unacceptable his report was, he would have got a clearer message.
When Garland addressed Council a coupler of weeks earlier (and maybe it was because his uber-boss, Regional Chair Roger Anderson, was in the audience), he was careful to blame the anticipated delay in the start of the project (and thus the probability of the project taking two summers to complete) on the utility companies who had to do their own groundwork before construction could begin.
But on April 8, Garland admitted to all present that even if the utility companies were out of the way before June 1, the contractor wouldn’t be able to break ground. Why? Because there would be no contractor! The Region, unbelievably and unaccountably, has not even let the tender for the job yet, even though the project has already been delayed by a year. Knowing the glacial pace at which the Region Works Department proceeds, the possibility of starting even by Canada Day is getting more and more remote. This is nothing short of farcical.
When asked politely about the tendering delay, Garland deflected the question to one of his underlings, who said that it was important that they get the tender documents “right”. Excuse me? Is he saying that it’s impossible to get the job done both “right” and “on time”? That we have to choose one or the other? If that’s the way we operated in the newspaper business, we’d be out of business next week, either because our readers would never know whether to believe us, or our advertisers wouldn’t be able to count on us hitting the letter box before the Friday sales. But of course Garland and his minions don’t have to worry about going out of business, only about losing their own jobs. And by the way they casually admitted their incompetence in the administration of this project, their superiors, the Regional Council, seem quite prepared to accept their bungling as a fact of life.
But it shouldn’t be acceptable. Garland, the project “manager”, introduced his project “coordinator”, and also mentioned the project “supervisor”. The contractor, once chosen, will no doubt also have a complex bureaucracy. Perhaps if there weren’t so many chiefs, things would get done more expediently.
There was also an undercurrent in Garland’s presentation which could partly explain why he and the rest of his staff don’t have too much fire in their bellies when it comes to this particular project. Garland has made no secret of his disappointment at Uxbridge’s decision to retain the angle parking in the portion of Brock Street being torn up. Last Wednesday, in discussing accessibility concerns, he showed an architectural rendering of how some store fronts could become accessible if the angle parking was done away with in the future. That drawing took time and money to produce, and the sole purpose seems to have been to thumb his nose at the merchants who went against his advice.
He also was explicit in saying that in the matter of bumpouts, he was in fact going against the stated preference of the majority of merchants on the street. Well, Mr. Garland needs to remember that he is a bureaucrat. The merchants along Brock Street pay his salary, and once they’ve heard his advice, they are perfectly entitled, through their Township Council, to ignore it.
Someone needs to hold Mr. Garland and his staff accountable for bungling this important job before it’s even begun. And even though they’re but two voices on Regional Council, Mayor Shepherd and Regional Councillor Herrema should be the loudest demanding answers.
