HALL: City of Calgary focussed on the wrong things... then a watermain broke

With the recent announcement that water main repairs could take up to a month to finish in Calgary, city residents will be treated to more restrictions. This latest fiasco from the City of Calgary highlights the extreme ineptitude and inability from our council to do their job. It started on day one with Mayor Jyoti Gondek. She, along with most of the newly elected council (save for Dan Mclean and Sean Chu,) decided one of their top priorities was declaring a “Climate Emergency.” This, in the middle of the pandemic. This, when inflation was, and still is, running at historic highs. Rather than focus on making life more affordable for ordinary Calgarians, Gondek and her gang of radical climate and social justice warrior council allies have continuously voted to raise property taxes year after year. And what has all of this increased cost on citizens yielded? More than $2 million dollars spent on the latest blue-ring esk “public art” and another 5 million spent on re-branding to the “Blue Sky City”.What all of this excessive municipal government spending has not yielded, however, is functioning infrastructure. Road quality has been on the decline since 2015, with money budgeted to simply keep conditions the same, not improve them. Roughly half of Calgarians avoid taking public transit because of safety concerns. And, of course, the catastrophic failure of the Bearspaw water pipeline at the beginning of the month. City employees will claim that the break was unexpected, that it can last a century in ideal conditions. Experts, who actually know what they are talking about, would disagree. In actuality, the average lifespan of a high pressure mainline water pipe is about 50 years at best. The age of the line that burst? 49 years young.The problem, of course, with providing adequate infrastructure is that it isn’t very sexy. It is hard to take a fun selfie in front of a water treatment plant, or write an impassioned speech about the road quality on Stoney Trail. What a lot of our politicians seem to forget these days however, is that they are not elected to look good. They are elected to run the government.They are therefore expected to deliver services and use our tax dollars wisely. This Calgary City Council has not done that. They have dramatically increased spending — to a rate of $3,480 per capita (a per capita increase since 2022 of $250.) Like most governments, fiscal restraint does not exist for Gondek and her crew. Rather than taking a hard look in the mirror at reckless spending in the wrong areas, our mayor continues to play the blame game on everyone but herself. “I have to say that without a strong partnership from the provincial and federal governments, the city takes on the full cost of maintenance work,” Gondek quipped last week. If only maintenance work, and the associated costs, fell directly under the purview of the municipal government she is in charge of.Water mainlines that are at the end of their lifecycle tend to start to fail. Perhaps, the City Council might have considered allocating appropriate funding towards the crucial things people expect in modern life. Calgary should be beyond the boil-water phase of civilization. Residents should be allowed to water their gardens and take showers lasting longer than the blink of an eye. The miracles of modern technology and advancement have allowed for comforts and a quality of life previously only available to kings, and yet Gondek has squandered that on pet projects nobody asked for.Ultimately, eventually, the line will be fixed. However, never one to let a good crisis go to waste, this council is already considering bringing in a permanent watering schedule. In a seeming effort to win the “taking away the most freedoms game”, the City wants to top the stupid single-use bylaw with new heights of restriction. Calgarians should remember these decisions, along with all the many more to come, when election season next rolls around.Conner Hall is an Engineer in Training who works in the energy sector in Calgary.

HALL: City of Calgary focussed on the wrong things... then a watermain broke

Related Stories