People like Winnipeg Transit director Rick Borland appear to have missed something over the summer. We had an election for mayor in June, remember? The people of Winnipeg had the option of choosing change or keeping the status quo.
They overwhelmingly chose change.
Part of that change was to review the whole idea of a $400-million, fuel-burning bus rapid transit system that was poised to proceed with virtually no homework done to support it.
Sorry to pee on your career pet project, Mr. Borland. But the people of Winnipeg don't want it.
I'm sure that must cause you great hardship. But Mayor Sam Katz and the democratically elected members of executive policy committee aren't there to bolster the job satisfaction of senior bureaucrats.
They're there to ensure that taxpayers' money is well spent. And we have a mayor -- for a change -- who's listening to the public rather than preaching to them what he thinks is good for them.
Borland fired off a scathing six-page letter to Bryan Gray yesterday, one of Katz's senior political staff, accusing him of "misleading" the mayor and EPC.
Decided to lash out.
Gray wrote a six-page memo this week reviewing a recent report on the bus rapid transit project. That report, misused by some to argue in favour of BRT is, in fact, little more than a marketing paper to help secure federal funding for the project.
Gray, who was providing political advice to his boss -- which is what he's paid to do -- pointed out in his memo that the report was limited and was based on speculative assumptions about projected ridership increases.
Which is true.
Borland took great exception to this and decided to lash out at Gray, making a series of wild accusations and demanding a written apology, which he won't get.
The head of Transit may want to take some remedial reading courses, though, because he appears to have trouble with basic reading skills.
For example, he accuses Gray of suggesting that data provided by Winnipeg Transit for the report was "deliberately erroneous or misleading."
Actually, what Gray wrote was that the data was not independently verified, that's all. He didn't suggest in any way, shape or form that Transit may have deliberately fudged its numbers.
Relax, Rick. Take a pill. Maybe count to 10 next time or something.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of Borland's letter, however, is when he states that even if ridership goes up by only 10% under rapid transit it's "clearly still an excellent public sector investment."
You're going to tell me that spending $75 million on BRT and only seeing your customer base go up by 10% is an "excellent public sector investment?"
That's retarded. It's as moronic as arguing that failing to include the $25-million cost of BRT buses in a cost-benefit analysis is OK.
The bottom line is Rick Borland doesn't have to answer to taxpayers when it comes time to balance the books, keep taxes down and do something about our crumbling infrastructure.
Katz and city council do. Borland can dream up all the pie-in-the-sky, wild-eyed, mushy-headed transit proposals he wants. He doesn't have to face the public on the broader task of running the city.
Katz does, and that's why he has political staff like Gray to help him make the best decisions for the city as a whole, not to facilitate the empire-building aspirations of a few nutbars.