Last week I watched a One on One interview between CBC's Peter Mansbridge and Calgary's relatively new mayor, Naheed Nenshi.
It was interesting to note that even with the disparities in overall population, Calgary and Estevan have to put up with similar problems on various fronts.
Earlier on, I had read a report that compared Calgary with Beijing, China which is 20 times the size of Calgary, but both are coping with population spurts.
Within the next five years, Calgary is hoping to add eight kilometres to its public transit system. Bejing will be adding 200. Estevan will be adding none, but we're hoping to get a truck route built within the next five years ... and that's after already waiting four years after the announcement date.
Calgary's population goes up by 20,000 per year, Beijing's by about 600,000. Estevan's goes up by 1,000. So it's tough to compare but one thing we can take away from these facts is that Calgary's top guy is as frustrated as our top guy when it comes to trying to get things past the bureaucratic mazes.
We simply need to move faster. When your population has grown the equivalent of the entire population of Carnduff every year for the past three years ... you need to work faster.
When you require two kilometres of road to be rebuilt and one kilometre to be constructed from scratch, annually, you need to have people move quickly.
When you need sewer, water, electrical and natural gas hook-ups to happen daily, not weekly, you require some sense of urgency.
When snow or dust and grime need to be removed, it needs to be removed effectively and that often means at the inconvenience of some.
Too often we find ourselves stuck in a 1940's style of bureaucracy wherein everyone who carries a title has to approve and sign off on every little piece of work that needs to get done. That means drawings, then designs, then an architect's rendering before the engineers get to approve and all along the line, everyone is guarding their own posteriors. Then there comes that grand glorious day when someone with authority eventually and actually says, with a flash of courage "let's build it."
But by then, the project's schematics are out-of-date, the mandate has shifted so the project gets sent back to the drawing board so the thinky people can have another go at it within the parameters of a new series of regulations, because after all, regulations are what they do best. In the meantime, the people who actually want to do something, are forced to twiddle thumbs.
I think we require a little more of the "can do" attitude rather than the "watch out, you might be doing it wrong," attitude.
Right about now in the Energy City, we see the need for all of us to kind of kick it up a notch. If we don't, our growth will catch us with our proverbial pants on the ground.
The last time we boomed in this city, a lot of things were done incorrectly, but they were still done.
I like the story about the building of Hillside's subdivision for instance.
The desperate need was identified so the local citizenry and management set about the task of getting the it built. About three-quarters of the way through the project, it was determined that it might be a good idea to get the blessing of the Department of Municipal Affairs, you know, those thinky people.
Well, the thinky people of that day were confounded and then angry but also totally confused at the audacity of our city for building without their approval.
Of course the response then was a sort of "why would we require your approval to provide a badly needed project in our city?" In other words, if Estevan wasn't going to do it, who would, and when? Nobody else had seemed to be intrigued with the desperation of the situation.
Permission was granted, we promised not to do it again ... unless of course, we needed to do it again, and everything got back to normal. The subdivision was completed, inhabited and has served the community pretty well. Nineteen houses and a trailer park went up within a month. Forty-seven more homes were 小蓝视频 built in Pleasantdale and another dozen in Valleyview, all completed in less than a year with another 150 residential lots sold before August of that year.
Maybe we need some of that "get on with it," spark again.
It goes back to that old adage that you can sit around and wait for permission forever, or you can go out and get something done and seek forgiveness later.
You know we saw some of that spark of spirit when it came to fund-raising and building our new Spectra Place. This community defied the odds and pushed the time line on that project and it seems to have turned out pretty well don't you think?
