Angus McGregor...Works Super

I learned something  last night.The huge pads of concrete that recently appeared on  grass boulevards may be  bus shelter bases.  So shelters will be following.

When  they first appeared, I was mystified.  Who did that?  Why did I not know about it?. Can't ask.  I  might have missed something due to my great age.  Never fear, I thought.  All will be revealed..

Sure enough, despite never having seen a passenger waiting. a bus stopping  a passenger boarding or embarking ,  it finally became apparent; the pads were located at regional bus stops. Signs were  hidden in the trees.

Last night, after council approved  of a software program  at a cost of $414,000 to keep track of details of assets and repairs and replacements of assets. I asked about a pile of concrete rubble which had been sitting beside a  smaller of the new concrete pad for at least a couple of months.

Seems the pads were installed, on contract, by the region. The contractor likely failed to remove the debris and apparently the region does not carry out  inspections to ensure a contract  is fulfilled.

I thought of Angus McGregor. He patrolled the roads, town and regional,  in   early morning  in a  pick-up truck. He wasn't above hopping out of the truck and tossing  the odd branch or tree limb or other debris lying in the  right-of-way into the back of the truck. Any remedial  work that needed doing, he noted and later issued a work order for it to be carried out pronto. It was an uncomplicated process.

I went with him occasionally on his early runs. No pile of rubble from an unfinished contract would have stayed in place more than twenty-four hours.

 When  the late Dick Illingworth was Mayor, he drove around  town on a Sunday, in a conspicuous  red convertible with a tape recorder making his own notes of things that needed to be done.  Dick was out of town during the week working as Acting CAO of the new Region of Sudbury.  He needed to make sure people knew he was on the job. They did.

Unlike the dead trees, surrounded by expensive accoutrements of planting, that stayed on Bathurst Street for  seven seasons until this year, ensuring  daily  public attention to failure and waste of public resources.

We have heard the Region is two billion dollars in debt. A reference  was made to the region's software program  during last night's discussion of the software program we approved. We spent $200,000, already on consultants. Now we have  moved  to the second phase with  $414,000. expenditure.

The third phase will be when  new staff are hired  to operate the program. We haven't got around to determining when  payback will be seen  in savings and efficiency.

If the Region is an example, it will mean  people in charge, even more than presently, will be glued to  computers and nobody will be out on the highways and byways seeing what needs to be done, hasn't been done and making sure it gets done.

But not to worry. Councillors are confident, Tons of important details will be fed  into  the computer.  Assets will be tracked.  Dead trees  representing lost assets lining  the highways for years after initial  failure to survive  and small piles of concrete rubble  will  appear and  lie around long enough to become part of the normal street scape. Catch basins will be choked with litter and debris washed there  in heavy rainfall casing floods and damage to structures.

I wonder if the  cost of the Region's software program is part of the two billion dollar debt. and  what   that  amount of debt costs  to carry ??