Comedy of errors just keeps rolling along

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2015 (3908 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’ve ever suffered through one of the lousier seasons of The Simpsons or Saturday Night Live, you know how hard it is to create consistently great comedy.

This isn’t a problem for the City of Winnipeg. Over the last five years, the creative geniuses at Manitoba’s largest municipality have produced one of the funniest serials in Canada, the Winnipeg Fire-Paramedic Station Replacement Program, originally billed as a tragedy but better understood as farce.

In 2010, former Winnipeg fire-paramedic chief Reid Douglas unveiled what was then a four-year plan to replace five decrepit stations, rebuild two in the same location and also build two brand-new stations. Since then, the city succeeded in getting four out of nine new stations built.

That’s the good-news, unfunny part of the story. As Winnipeggers are aware, the city awarded the contracts to build those stations without telling council who won the job, arranged a three-for-one land swap involving two of the old stations, built one of the new facilities on land it doesn’t own and then cancelled that swap after the scheme unravelled in 2012.

As an external audit documented, the program suffered from severe mismanagement. Former Winnipeg chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl, who famously declared he was only aware of the project “from 50,000 feet,” turned out to be the primary person on the ground.

The long-running show was supposed to wind down when the largest and last of the four new fire-paramedic stations, No. 11 on Portage Avenue, opened at the end of 2013, a few million over budget, a few seasons late and a few thousand square feet larger than promised.

The final loose end for this station, was the city’s stubborn refusal to release an un-redacted version of a traffic study completed by Stantec Consulting Ltd. in 2011. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation sought it through a freedom-of-information request after former Manitoba director Colin Craig noted the city hired Stantec to do the work.

The study was important when you consider the station’s location: inside the cloverleaf where Portage Avenue crosses over Route 90. The land was chosen because the city already owned it and thus wouldn’t incur any property-acquisition costs.

The problem was, pretty much nobody builds anything inside a cloverleaf, anywhere in the world. The city’s refusal to divulge what Stantec said about the station seemed suspicious, especially when officials dug in their heels; former St. Norbert councillor Justin Swandel even called Craig an “enemy of Winnipeg” for demanding to see the study.

On Tuesday, the city finally made it public. To the surprise of nobody, Stantec Consulting concluded it’s pretty much bonkers to build anything inside a cloverleaf.

“Locating a development of any kind within an interchange does not comply with industry-accepted standards regarding traffic operations and traffic safety,” Stantec wrote.

“Interchanges are areas of high complexity for drivers with multiple on/off ramps and weaving areas. Introduction of development accesses within these areas has the potential to create serious safety and operational problems. There are examples of where this has been done, but it remains very unusual.”

Unfortunately, the unusual was usual during the ill-fated era when Sam Katz was Winnipeg’s mayor and his CAO buddy Sheegl ran roughshod over processes put in place to protect the public interest.

Swap the Parker lands for some Fort Rouge land without assessing either parcel? Yeah, that’ll never backfire. Buy the former Canada Post building for nearly $30 million without determining its value? Don’t worry about the basement flooding. Sign a “guaranteed maximum price” construction contract for converting that building into a new police headquarters even though the design work was only 30 per cent complete and subject to change? It’s not like the RCMP will ever investigate the project.

The City of Winnipeg’s screw-ups are only funny because they continue to occur. Nobody ever laughs at competence.

Happily, the city’s new-found willingness to respect freedom-of-information legislation bodes well for the next time an official is tempted to prevent bad news from reaching council decision-makers.

Station No. 11 isn’t going anywhere. The Stantec study won’t affect the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service. Its publication, however, serves as a lesson in the perils of trying to prevent embarrassing information from reaching the public.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca