Municipal governments love to throw away the hard-earned money of taxpayers with wild abandon. Stories of waste and corruption from local governments seem to have no end. Calgary’s city hall has been working hard to outdo itself with boondoggles and waste.On the low side, Calgary blew $4.8 million tax dollars and took four years to come up with the slogan “Blue Sky City.” There should be a forensic audit of that rip off.On the higher end, Calgary spent $1.4 billion and nine years on an LRT expansion without laying an inch of track. By the time the province finally pulled funding from the project, the projected cost of the train line had ballooned from $100,000 per metre to $600,000 per metre. Left alone, Gondek’s council and inept city administration probably could have pushed the cost of the plan over a million per metre. It will now cost an estimated $700 million just to get out of the boondoggle. A new disaster is looming on the horizon with electric buses.Like most progressive mayors, Jyoti Gondek has a climate change obsession. One of her first acts as mayor was to entrench an insane, $87 billion climate plan for the city of Calgary. Changing Calgary’s diesel bus fleet to electric buses is presumably part of that plan. The city council embraced a pilot project to purchase 14 electric buses for a total project cost of $14 million tax dollars. That pilot was set to begin in 2022. The problem is, no buses have arrived. While the city has constructed charging stations and made plans, the buses are nowhere to be found. A short, terse statement was on the City of Calgary site in August simply saying the buses are delayed for now. There were some utterances about supply chains. The bus supply appears to have collapsed.In looking at the company the city bought the buses from, it’s not hard to see why there is a delay. Vicinity Motor Corp appears to be on the brink of going broke. Their shares have dropped to penny stock value, and they only managed to make 11 buses in the last quarter of 2023. They haven’t responded to press inquiries and they are heavily in debt. The odds aren’t looking good for the city in getting either the buses or a refund.It gets worse.In December 2022, the city announced they would go ahead with a $489 million plan to buy and equip 259 electric buses. When questions were asked why the city was moving forward with this massive purchase despite the pilot project not having started, people were told that the electric bus program in Edmonton was so successful they decided Calgary didn’t need to wait for the pilot to finish.Edmonton’s electric bus program has been a complete catastrophe. The buses cost a fortune and were found not to work in cold weather. Diesel upgrades had to be added to heat the buses at great expense and then then the buses began to break down en masse. The city couldn’t repair them because the company that manufactured them had gone bankrupt. They can’t get spare parts and two thirds of the buses are now out of service.The Calgary timeline calls for the buses to be procured in the early part of 2024. Nothing has been reported on that. Perhaps they can't find a solvent company to purchase from. When it’s considered the pilot program buses appear to have been lost after some years, it becomes hard to believe the larger order will be arriving anytime soon. The dollars are sure going out the door quickly though.It's not just Canadian cities diving into failed electric bus programs. Cities across North America are all sitting on growing fleets of broken-down buses and blown budgets including Denver, Philadelphia, Asheville and West Covina. Every size of city in every type of climate is represented. The commonality is a shared failure to get a functional electric bus fleet. Apparently Calgary’s city council never heard of the programs in those cities.Where is the city is procuring the massive electric fleet from? Progress updates are hard to find. As with the catastrophic Green Line, the city is keeping information hidden as deeply as possible.Citizens must demand a progress report from the city for this half billion-dollar bus program and if the city can’t demonstrate it is moving along smoothly, it must pull the plug immediately. These boondoggles only get worse with time and sunk money. Have they spent the money already?Have they already equipped bus barns with 259 charging stations to languish empty as the charging stations for the pilot program have?We likely won’t get answers until the program implodes and most of the current council along with the mayor will have probably been replaced by then. We have a chance to stop this train wreck now though. Nobody can pretend we didn’t see it coming.
