Cowardly Don Iveson responsible for bridge-building delays

Hey, here's a question for you. Ask me if you've heard it before.

Under Mayor Coward's inept 'leadership' has a single major project been on or near schedule?

Wednesday marked the latest version of this game, with the news that the new Walterdale bridge project has been pushed back a year. The new bridge, which was supposed to be finished in Fall 2015, has moved to 2016 as "the steel from South Korea" (read: Hyndai) is behind schedule.

This adds another black mark to the chickenshit little dweeb who runs around with his hands in the shape of a heart pretending his fag-loving ass is a decent mayor: previous black marks include the 102nd Ave bridge disaster (Groat Road is finally after 3 weeks ready to reopen for traffic -- it was supposed to be three days), and of course everybody's favourite whipping boy: the LRT expansion that was/is delayed for years because the city can't figure out how to get a goddamned signal switch working properly. It's expected to finally open in May, but that assumes that the latest delay isn't going to be as big a problem as they thought. Remember when the signalling problem was a month, maybe a month and a half away from being fixed? Mayor Coward hopes you don't!

This isn't a new thing in the time since Iveson the Coward was involved in city politics. The Quesnell Bridge rehabilitation was a year behind schedule, and that wasn't just because they were busy meeting Mayor Coward's ridiculous art requirements.^† Dawson Bridge's rehabilitation was on time and then instantly met with further repairs. It isn't just bridges, either: home construction is delayed by unnecessary government red tape (from the council that has a "plan to eliminate homelessness")

^† By the way, if you enjoyed the maximum disruption of the Quesnell project, you'll love the Whitemud-Terwillegar redesign that is coming down the pipeline. The city put this out for engineering tenders in 2010 and didn't bother to incorporate it with the Quesnell work, meaning that we'll have another 4 years of shit traffic on the Whitemud coming soon.

This all comes down to one thing: no accountability at the top. Anybody who's even taken a rinky-dinky course in project management is fully aware of two fundamental rules:
1) things will go wrong, often horribly wrong, in large projects
2) a strong and effective manager will ensure things going wrong don't impact schedule

City administration and Mayor Coward can cry foul about "special and unique" circumstances until they're blue in the face. Heavy construction steel being short is a long-running worldwide problem that grown up organizations have figured out a way to face. That's where (2) comes in. There needs to be a strong interest and will at the top (and a strong interest in will that's also smart and adaptive, making a total of four words that definitely don't describe Mayor Coward) to identify, prevent, and deal with the ridiculous things that happen, from steel shortages to bending girders.

That just isn't happening in Edmonton. Companies that are involved in big ticket infrastructure projects know that the city is staffed by a bunch of incompetent pussies that will let them get away with anything they like. Even when they are contractually on the hook for overage payments (though, in the case of issues like the 102 Avenue bridge, having your original quote being about 65% over budget helps!) companies know that there isn't much real downside to punching the City of Edmonton in the dick. Ever since gutless liberal coward Don Iveson became mayor, the problem has gotten steadily worse (it started about the same time that he became councilor).

The reason? They suck at their jobs. They'll find a lot of people to blame, and credit others who wrote clever contracts when there are few direct financial repercussions, but when it comes to actually competently doing the job that they are supposed to do, they're completely shitty at it.

They all need to be fired.<sup>‡

‡</sup> And, as I said on Twitter last week, when I say that I mean they need to be set on fire and deliberately burnt to death. Then hung from the bridges they can't finish building.