Latest spending boondoggle looming for the city of Calgary
Episode Stats
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209.49721
Summary
Calgary has a plan to turn its entire fleet of city buses into electric buses, but they ve been nowhere near ready, and now they re going to have to go back to using their aging fleet of diesel-powered buses.
Transcript
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municipal governments, they love to throw away the hard-earned money of taxpayers with wild
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abandon. I mean, the stories of waste and corruption from local governments seem to have
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no end. And Calgary City Hall has been working hard to outdo itself with their boondoggles and
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waste. I mean, on the low side, Calgary blew 4.8 million tax dollars, and it took them four years
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to come up with a new slogan for the city. The slogan was Blue Sky City. Yeah, almost 5 million
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for that, guys. There should be a forensic audit of that ripoff. And then on the high end, Calgary
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spent $1.4 billion in nine years on an LRT expansion without laying an inch of track. By the time the
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government finally stepped in from the province and pulled the funding from the project, the projected
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cost of this train line had ballooned from $100,000 per meter to $600,000 per meter. If left
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alone, Gondek's Council of Clowns and an inept city administration probably could have pushed the cost
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that plan to a million dollars a meter. It's now going to cost another $700 million just to get out
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of that mess with the contracts. Now we've got a new disaster looming on the horizon, and that's with
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electric buses. Like most progressive mayors, Jody Gondek has a climate change obsession, and one of
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her first acts as mayor was to entrench an insane, and it is insane, $87 billion climate plan for the
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city of Calgary. Yeah, that wasn't a mistaken number. Her plan is to blow $87 billion just in the city of
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Calgary. Changing Calgary's bus fleet to electric buses is presumably part of that plan. A pilot
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project was embraced by City Council to purchase 14 electric buses for a cost of about $14 million.
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The pilot was set to begin in 2022. Well, it's 2024 now, and we're getting here towards the tail end
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of it. The problem is no buses have arrived. The city has constructed charging stations and made plans,
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but the buses are nowhere to be found. If you look on the city website, a short, terse statement
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was made in August saying the buses are delayed for now. There's some little utterances about supply
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chain issues. Yes, indeed, there's a supply chain issue. The buses aren't here. This bus supply seems
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to have collapsed. If you look at the company the city bought the buses from, it's not hard to see
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where there's a delay. Vicinity Motor Corporation appears to be on the brink of going broke. Their
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shares have dropped to penny stock value, and they've only managed to make 11 buses in the last
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quarter of 2023. They haven't responded to press inquiries, and they're heavily in debt. The odds
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aren't looking good for the city in getting either of the buses, of course, a refund on whatever
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they've spent so far. But oh, it gets worse. In December 2022, the city announced they would go
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ahead with a $489 million plan to buy and equip 259 electric buses. I mean, when questions were asked
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why the city's moving forward with this massive purchase, despite the pilot project not having
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started even, people were told, well, the electric bus program in Edmonton was so successful,
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they decided Calgary didn't need to wait for the pilot to finish. Edmonton's electric bus program
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has been a complete catastrophe. The buses cost a fortune. There were 60 of them. They were found
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not to work in cold weather. Diesel upgrades had to be added to the buses to heat the motors to make
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them work at great expense, and then the buses began to break down en masse. But the city couldn't
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repair them because the company that manufactured them had gone bankrupt. So now they can't get spare
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parts and two thirds of the buses are out of service. $60 million folks. Now the first of
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Calgary's 259 electric buses is supposed to be in service in a year or two, I believe. They're all
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supposed to be in use not too long after that. But when you consider the pilot program buses have
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been, they've been lost in the mix somewhere after years, it comes hard to believe that this larger
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order is going to be arriving anytime soon. So where's the city at with the procurement of this
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massive electric fleet? What's the progress been to date and how much has been spent already? Well,
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they're not telling anybody. As with the green line, the city's keeping the information hidden as
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deeply as possible. Citizens, you got to get up and demand a progress report from the city for this
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half billion dollar bus program. And if the city can't demonstrate it's moving along smoothly, it must
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pull the plug on this thing immediately. These things only get worse with more time and sinking more
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money in. Have they spent the money already? Have they already equipped bus barns with 259 charging
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stations to languish empty waiting, you know, as the pilot program has been going? I mean,
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we likely won't get answers until the program implodes. And most of the current council along
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with the mayor have probably been replaced by then. We've got a chance to stop this train wreck or bus
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wreck, if you want to call it that. Either way, when the time comes, nobody can pretend we didn't see
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it coming. I'm warning you now guys, and don't act surprised when this falls apart.