On Wednesday, Calgary city council welcomed the panel of experts who authoured the Bearspaw south water feeder main report for a question-and-answer session that ran well into the night.
Succinctly, the report says city council and administration were warned more than 20 years ago, after the 2004 McKnight feeder-main failure. At the time, the city was told about the dangers of aging pipes, flawed design, corrosive soils, and steel cables snapping.
Breaks occurred in other North American cities and were acted on. But Calgary didn’t. Despite warnings in 2004, 2011, 2015, 2017, and 2021, recommendations from experts weren’t followed.
That time frame includes the Bronconnier, Nenshi, and Gondek administrations, during which city councils spent millions on ‘world-class’ vanity projects such as the Peace Bridge; a fancy new boulevard on Memorial Dr.; a $100-million facelift of 16th Ave. NW; silly works of art such as the big blue ring in northwest Calgary and the sticks and stones ‘thing’ fronting Canada Olympic Park.
These and other ‘diversions’ were “a function of underestimated likelihood of failure, not appreciating the significant impact of a failure, emphasis on other priorities and occasional periods of operating budget constraints” reads the report, which is a scathing review of city councils and city administration.
You can access the report here.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Calgary’s new council, elected only two-and-a-half months ago, showed they’re getting their ‘sea legs’ and is a decided improvement over the last council.
That bunch was dominated by the ‘Hateful 8’ who were firmly under the left-wing ideological thumb of former mayor Jyoti Gondek.
They were the gang that brought Calgarians a climate emergency, a single-use plastic bylaw, blanket upzoning and DEI-fueled programs such as the Calgary Plan (also known as the guide to a 15-minute city) and the Game Plan, which drips with wokeness. There was other silliness, including renaming Fort Calgary, spending millions of dollars on a new city slogan – The Blue Sky City – as if Calgary is the only city in the world with blue skies.
Worst of all they forced their woke ideologies on city staff, even though the majority are not of the same thinking. Forcing beliefs on people who don’t agree with them leads to a very uncomfortable workplace.
On Wednesday, the new crew showed they were a group of learners, not lecturers, as were the likes of former Cllrs. Carra, Walcott, Penner, and mayor Gondek.
There were no leading questions from councillors looking for answers they wanted to hear. No preaching nor pontificating. No councillors who pretended to know more than the panelists.
A new group seeking information about the breaks, what caused them and why the breaks surprised many people at city hall, when they should not have been surprised. Most importantly, asking how to prevent breaks from ever happening again, from the point of view of the individual private enterprise people on the panel.
In the face of this major emergency threatening Calgarians, councillors all appeared cool, calm, and collected, asking excellent questions about how to proceed going forward, not just with the water main break, but how city hall should be run, from a private business point of view, given the indictment it got in the report.
All across the city and on social media, people are calling for heads to roll in the wake of the break. The report does not single out any city hall bureaucrat to take the blame, saying “the water utility is split across multiple city departments leaving no single leader accountable for end-to-end outcomes,” although the position of CAO David Duckworth is mentioned.
“The first person with full visibility across the water utility is the CAO, who also oversees more than 60 other portfolios, 10 in the absence of a single accountable executive, decisions were often delayed or deprioritized, compounded by a consensus driven culture that normalized deferral of action on critical issues,” reads the report.
In a media scrum on Wednesday, Duckworth said, “We take this very seriously. We apologize to Calgarians for being where we are today, we don’t want to be where we are.”
Whether that will mute those seeking his head is unlikely, but perhaps the heads that need to be rolled either didn’t run for office again or were defeated in the last election.
For years, city hall has been the epitome of bureaucracy run amok, and according to the report “gaps persisted across multiple management teams, successive councils, and organization structures, in part because council lacked the visibility and expert support to provide effective oversight.”
“Reporting to council was periodic and high-level, providing limited transparency into operational and risk performance. Council also had limited access to the independent technical expertise required to provide oversight to management.”
“These gaps exist within today’s organization structure, wherein the water utility is split across multiple city departments leaving no single leader accountable for end-to-end outcomes.”
The water feeder main isn’t the only thing that needs repairing. The relationship between council and administration also needs a major overhaul, with a clear understanding that council, as elected by the people, is the boss.