Bye-bye O-Train
So, City Council killed the O-train today. Here is the important paragraph:
During the election, Larry O'Brian promised to scrap the current proposal, unless it would be fiscal suicide to do so. I'm not an expert in the matter, but I suspect that if this situation isn't that, it sure is grazing your pocketbook with a bullet. Then again, he also promised to spend 6 months pondering the issue, and ended up making the craziest possible decision during the first council meeting.
But this isn't just his fault- it's all of Council's. Its the majority of council that approved that half-baked modification, its the majority of council that seems to want to pay penalties and get no train. In general, this is not exactly a day where you get a ringing endorsement for municipal decisionmaking.
City lawyers have estimated that the decision could also cost the city between $250 million and $300 million in claims from Siemens-PCL/Dufferin, the group of companies contracted to design, build and maintain the rail line through an agreement worth $778.2-million. The city has already spent $65 million on the project.Now, the city was only going to have to pay 380 million to build the actual train, the rest coming from the feds and the provinces. Instead, we'll get to pay the Siemens group, get no train now, and get to pay more should we ever decide to build one (which we should).
During the election, Larry O'Brian promised to scrap the current proposal, unless it would be fiscal suicide to do so. I'm not an expert in the matter, but I suspect that if this situation isn't that, it sure is grazing your pocketbook with a bullet. Then again, he also promised to spend 6 months pondering the issue, and ended up making the craziest possible decision during the first council meeting.
But this isn't just his fault- it's all of Council's. Its the majority of council that approved that half-baked modification, its the majority of council that seems to want to pay penalties and get no train. In general, this is not exactly a day where you get a ringing endorsement for municipal decisionmaking.
posted by an Mike Powell at 12:20 AM
1 Comments:
What's interesting about this political situation is that the majority of people agree on a solution, but the disagreement over the details of the solution prevents the collective action, it prevents anyaction from being taken, even though this result isn't in anybody's interest. Condorcet would go wild! Game theorists live for this stuff.
But you win some, you lose some with this problem. After all, a majority of Canadian MPs once favoured _some_ restrictions on abortion, but it was only disagreements over the form that such restrictions should take which prevented a law restricting abortions from being passed.
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