LYTLE: Mayor Gondek, tear down this snitch line

The current water restrictions are weighing heavily on my mind and a few things need to be said.First, we are being patronised... “Stop using so much water or something bad will happen.” My mother used to use such language with me to indicate that she was about to become the author of my pain. Why do I get the feeling that Mayor Gondek is channeling my mother?We are well and truly into the “fix the damn pipe” period of Mayor Gondek’s tenure and, not surprisingly, we mere citizens are apparently not doing our bit to reduce consumption. For this sin, we must endure the ire of our betters.But here is a different potential explanation. My neighbour recently installed a water monitoring valve that will shut the water off in his house in the event of a sudden leak in the system. For example, if he and his family are on vacation and the hot water tank suddenly lets loose, the valve will sense the drop in water line pressure and shut off the water to the house. The unit comes with a cell phone app that lets him know at any point in time the temperature and pressure in his home water system. It is very clever, and I am tempted to install such a unit myself.The point of this is not to give an infomercial but to say that today my neighbour told me that, in the last few days, the water pressure in his house has gone from 75 psi to 88 psi, a 17 percent increase. He was concerned about the impact on his water pipes. I know next to nothing about the Calgary water distribution system but with all the work currently being done on it, a change in home water pressure does not surprise me. According to Mr. Bernoulli, as pressure goes up, so does volumetric flow rate, all other things staying the same. Are there widespread increases in water pressure across the city? Could the pressure increase be adding to the 22 percent system losses, thus preventing the city from achieving its water consumption targets?And speaking of system losses of 22 percent, how is the city doing with its project to stop its own leaks? Funny that we don’t hear too much about this. Madam Mayor, instead of whining to me that my showers are a minute too long, how about you recover some of the 80 million liters of treated water you are losing every day? Just a thought…Item 2: I was raised in a mining community and in grade 6 I said goodbye to my best friend because his father was transferred to another mine in another community. His father’s new job was to evaluate and rehabilitate the mine after workers had tunnelled into an underground aquifer that flooded the mine shaft and stopped production. The solution was to freeze the ground adjacent to the shaft to keep water from continuing to pour in. It was a very expensive proposition.In 2012, just prior to the flooding, Mayor Nenshi announced that a new Green Line LRT system would link communities in the southeast with those in the central north part of the city. The main node of the project would be an underground LRT station in the city’s core. What a brave new world when we can build significant infrastructure projects underground in a flood plain and active aquifer! And if my memory serves, this was the most expensive of the LRT options presented to the city.Fortunately, in the past few days our premier has pulled the plug on this, in my view, stupidest of vanity projects sponsored by Mayors Nenshi and Gondek. Kudos to Premier Smith for saving Calgary taxpayers from a boondoggle that might have bankrupted us all. But, it shouldn’t have taken the province to recognize the madness of continuing a project that was halved in length or scope every time a new cost estimate was created. Mayors Nenshi and Gondek seemed to mistakenly believe that repeatedly reducing the project scope to “stay on budget” is a wise and judicious use of taxpayer dollars. Premier Smith has allowed us to dodge a bullet, and we can safely ignore any comments from newly minted NDP leader Nenshi because he is caught in a conflict of interest.Here is the third and most important thing. The City of Calgary has fired up the Nenshi-Gondek snitch line again and proudly announced that, as of Monday, it had received 347 calls. This needs to stop, now.In the early 1990s, one of my neighbours called City Bylaw officers to report the delinquency of my dog. An officer was sent to my home to deliver a summons and when he was greeted warmly and nobly (aggressive hand licking) by the dog he said,“He doesn’t seem like a killer.”I decided to fight the case in court if only to find out who hated me and/or my dog so much that they would put his life in danger. I lost the case because the delinquency was all mine, but the dog’s life was spared, and the experience provided some very funny stories. What was less humorous was finding out that the snitch was someone I had thought to be a friend. When I asked her why she didn’t just knock on my door and tell me to be more considerate of the neighbourhood and put my dog on a leash when I walked him, she said,“If I had known that I would have to come to court I would never have reported it.”I was in the wrong and so I don’t harbour ill will towards my neighbour but it was difficult to be friends with her again. We moved out of the neighbourhood as soon as we could. And so today I wonder at the malign spirits that would motivate a mayor — two mayors in fact — to actively create such division in neighbourhoods around the city.My advice to those who may be fined is to fight their case if only to expose the snitches and get their own funny stories. My advice to would-be snitches is to go to the person watering their lawn and explain why you think they are wrong to do so. And to Mayor Gondek my advice is to shut down her snitch line and start acting like a leader instead of a… well you can finish the sentence as you wish.

LYTLE: Mayor Gondek, tear down this snitch line

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