Western Standard - Latest spending boondoggle looming for the city of Calgary

00:00:00.000 municipal governments, they love to throw away the hard-earned money of taxpayers with wild

00:00:04.280 abandon. I mean, the stories of waste and corruption from local governments seem to have

00:00:07.860 no end. And Calgary City Hall has been working hard to outdo itself with their boondoggles and

00:00:13.860 waste. I mean, on the low side, Calgary blew 4.8 million tax dollars, and it took them four years

00:00:20.080 to come up with a new slogan for the city. The slogan was Blue Sky City. Yeah, almost 5 million

00:00:26.380 for that, guys. There should be a forensic audit of that ripoff. And then on the high end, Calgary

00:00:31.440 spent $1.4 billion in nine years on an LRT expansion without laying an inch of track. By the time the

00:00:38.360 government finally stepped in from the province and pulled the funding from the project, the projected

00:00:43.120 cost of this train line had ballooned from $100,000 per meter to $600,000 per meter. If left

00:00:49.600 alone, Gondek's Council of Clowns and an inept city administration probably could have pushed the cost 0.97

00:00:53.600 that plan to a million dollars a meter. It's now going to cost another $700 million just to get out 0.68

00:00:58.580 of that mess with the contracts. Now we've got a new disaster looming on the horizon, and that's with

00:01:03.700 electric buses. Like most progressive mayors, Jody Gondek has a climate change obsession, and one of

00:01:09.200 her first acts as mayor was to entrench an insane, and it is insane, $87 billion climate plan for the 1.00

00:01:15.580 city of Calgary. Yeah, that wasn't a mistaken number. Her plan is to blow $87 billion just in the city of 1.00

00:01:21.300 Calgary. Changing Calgary's bus fleet to electric buses is presumably part of that plan. A pilot

00:01:27.460 project was embraced by City Council to purchase 14 electric buses for a cost of about $14 million.

00:01:34.020 The pilot was set to begin in 2022. Well, it's 2024 now, and we're getting here towards the tail end

00:01:39.900 of it. The problem is no buses have arrived. The city has constructed charging stations and made plans,

00:01:45.600 but the buses are nowhere to be found. If you look on the city website, a short, terse statement

00:01:49.900 was made in August saying the buses are delayed for now. There's some little utterances about supply

00:01:54.720 chain issues. Yes, indeed, there's a supply chain issue. The buses aren't here. This bus supply seems

00:02:00.320 to have collapsed. If you look at the company the city bought the buses from, it's not hard to see

00:02:04.280 where there's a delay. Vicinity Motor Corporation appears to be on the brink of going broke. Their

00:02:09.000 shares have dropped to penny stock value, and they've only managed to make 11 buses in the last

00:02:13.600 quarter of 2023. They haven't responded to press inquiries, and they're heavily in debt. The odds

00:02:19.160 aren't looking good for the city in getting either of the buses, of course, a refund on whatever

00:02:23.680 they've spent so far. But oh, it gets worse. In December 2022, the city announced they would go

00:02:29.240 ahead with a $489 million plan to buy and equip 259 electric buses. I mean, when questions were asked

00:02:36.940 why the city's moving forward with this massive purchase, despite the pilot project not having

00:02:41.000 started even, people were told, well, the electric bus program in Edmonton was so successful,

00:02:45.160 they decided Calgary didn't need to wait for the pilot to finish. Edmonton's electric bus program

00:02:50.260 has been a complete catastrophe. The buses cost a fortune. There were 60 of them. They were found

00:02:55.500 not to work in cold weather. Diesel upgrades had to be added to the buses to heat the motors to make

00:03:00.160 them work at great expense, and then the buses began to break down en masse. But the city couldn't

00:03:04.000 repair them because the company that manufactured them had gone bankrupt. So now they can't get spare

00:03:09.100 parts and two thirds of the buses are out of service. $60 million folks. Now the first of

00:03:14.880 Calgary's 259 electric buses is supposed to be in service in a year or two, I believe. They're all

00:03:20.220 supposed to be in use not too long after that. But when you consider the pilot program buses have

00:03:24.340 been, they've been lost in the mix somewhere after years, it comes hard to believe that this larger

00:03:28.540 order is going to be arriving anytime soon. So where's the city at with the procurement of this

00:03:33.720 massive electric fleet? What's the progress been to date and how much has been spent already? Well,

00:03:37.780 they're not telling anybody. As with the green line, the city's keeping the information hidden as

00:03:41.800 deeply as possible. Citizens, you got to get up and demand a progress report from the city for this

00:03:47.060 half billion dollar bus program. And if the city can't demonstrate it's moving along smoothly, it must

00:03:51.780 pull the plug on this thing immediately. These things only get worse with more time and sinking more

00:03:56.400 money in. Have they spent the money already? Have they already equipped bus barns with 259 charging

00:04:02.220 stations to languish empty waiting, you know, as the pilot program has been going? I mean,

00:04:07.460 we likely won't get answers until the program implodes. And most of the current council along

00:04:11.160 with the mayor have probably been replaced by then. We've got a chance to stop this train wreck or bus

00:04:16.100 wreck, if you want to call it that. Either way, when the time comes, nobody can pretend we didn't see

00:04:20.520 it coming. I'm warning you now guys, and don't act surprised when this falls apart.

Western Standard - September 27, 2024

Latest spending boondoggle looming for the city of Calgary

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