Rooster Tails of Sparks...
City of Calgary Clears Snow
Appreciating that some areas of Calgary may have seen more snowfall over the last 24 hours than did in my hood…we’d barely seen enough worthy of pulling out a shovel…the city spent into their budget of Snow Removal, arcing sparks in large rooster tails, clearing off relatively clear asphalt.
And despite Calgary being known to have snow during the winter…we’re still seeing only 52% of this having been cleared in the last 18.5 hours…
Where, they’ve afforded themselves 36 hours to clear snow…if you haven’t done the same in 24, you’ll face a $150 ticket.
Through the neighborhoods, in front of a couple of schools, still in my hood…people are either buried in to the bottom of the doors of their vehicles, in situations they’ll have to dig themselves out of banks of ice, if they need use of their vehicles this Christmas Season.
And I know that some of you will have to precariously park your black, green and blue bins either poking into lanes of traffic or have to somehow and cautiously brave the bergs and teeter-balance your trash, praying the wind won’t flop them over, emptying their contents into the streets.
I get that budgeting for snow-removal on a calendar budget can be a challenge…given that:
Snow doesn’t obey a calendar year;
Yearly snowfall varies.
But with the New Segment of the Ring Road open, an additional 4.9% added to our population (69k residents)…snow routes no longer being enforced and most residential streets not being offered this in as much as previous years have…
And with an increase of $600 Million being added to the budget, where no cuts could have possibly been made, according to Jyoti Gondek and the hateful 8, the budget for snow removal was only increased by $1 Million, from $54 Million in 2023 to $55 Million in 2024.
Problem is…because of the shift in the seasonal snow in 2023, where Calgary was brown Christmas almost up to Christmas Day…and had extended snowfall into May of 2024, a good portion of that budget has already been blown.
Like you, I’m asking myself…what the hell happened to the rest of the 2023 budget?
Is this one of those, ‘use it or lose it’, budget spends…like how Foreign Affairs put in emergency orders for a Half a Million Dollars in furniture on March 31st so that their budget wouldn’t shrink for the next fiscal year?
Because it really ought not be.
And we shouldn’t allow this sort of shit to happen.
Seriously…how can you even conceptualize $523 K, taxpayer dollars being pissed away on an Emergency Furniture order…$55 Million, in snow removal budget that sees Rooster Tails of sparks on dry streets, prioritizing bicycle lanes in minus teen temperatures, crippling automobiles to being high-centered, in front of their houses?
In an AFFORDABILTY Crisis, coming into Christmas…
It’s all very disturbing and fiscal responsibility needs to be introduced back into our bloated bureaucracies…
Their ideas that cities and provinces can’t be run like a business, carte blanche spending on insanity, as an excuse to swell budgets can no longer be tolerated.
While we should never expect any branch of government to make our lives better…
They also shouldn’t create higher costs to make our lives patently worse.