Another Heart Warming City Works Story - Thanks, Gavin

Many years ago there was a garage at 4th and Blenheim....Blenheim Motors. They also had gas pumps which augmented their business. The service station was run by two very honest guys and I had my VW serviced there for a few years. One day I was there and the access to the pumps was blocked by City road crews...I asked Andy(one of the co-owners) what was happening. "They are re-paving and improving the access. We can deal with the revenue loss, it'll take about four days for them to finish." All was done and it looked great until a week after it was repaved and 'finished' the access was torn up by City water works. Andy was miffed when he was told that it would take about two weeks to finish. He called City Hall to complain and asked for a reduction of his business license fee and was shunted around so many different 'crats at City Hall that he gave up and bit the bullet. Now it was beginning to cost the garage money. Finally the city's job was done, and the street re-paved and all was normal for about a week and a half. OK.......no! A new crew arrived and began to tear up the access again. Andy blew his stack and asked, "what the hell is going on now?" The answer was City Electrical ops. Andy was on the phone to City Hall to tell them that he was not going to pay his business license fee due to significant loss of revenue from his pumps. When he finally reached the city mandarin, Andy was told in no uncertain terms that if he refused to pay, the City would shut him down.
All of this could have been avoided and everything could have been accomplished in three days had there been some co-ordination by the city works and Andy would have been a happy camper. This was the 70's.....have things changed that much at City Hall? I doubt it very much.

Bountiful, Indeed

Any guy who fathers more than 108 children (What does "more than" even mean? 2,009? 18 trillion) should have his little weenie put on ice and made a permanent exhibit at Science World.

NOTE: by the way that Mr. Blackmore is always smiling.

You'd be smiling too if you spent most of your day shtupping teenage girls.

Whether laws against polygamy are constitutional or not, whether the practice is repugnant or odd or not, there are laws against sexual exploitation and what has taken so long for those to be enforced?

And maybe someday the full story will be told about the young boys, seen as a sexual threat to the leaders, are basically enslaved at an early age as workers in the community's primary businesses like logging.

These sects are sick little enclaves and their hiding behind religious freedoms is an obscenity.

Priorities, Part 9,462

$365 Million for a new retractable roof for BC Place.

No problem. Do it. we pay for it. No problem.

$300,000 debt for Ballet B.C.

Get outta here! You're on your own, Fairy Princesses!

The good news is that the Ballet did in fact save themselves from bankruptcy by offering debtors a few cents on every dollar owed. Which is fine.

But Glad-handing Gord could have paid the full tilt iin the stroke of a pen if he had any vision of what this province is supposed to look like outside of highways and skating rinks.

Coming Home to Roost

OLYMPIC VILLAGE SHOCK

was the headline on the front page of yesterdays' Vancouver Sun.

Our response?

Shock? Not really.

Here's what I wrote on Tuesday.

"These public-private partnerships might even work on occasion if the rubes who are in public office and who have never run so much as a Bingo game weren't creaming their jeans with the excitement of playing with the Big Boys.

The suits in the towers must be bending over in hysterics every time the phone rings from one of these municipal offices with yet another grand scheme to build a highway or a subway line or a bunch of hospitals."

Now, we are told that the tab could run close to One Billion Dollars.

Understand that any shortfall will have to be made up by raising taxes and that I and you will pay for the clownish country-bumpkin mistakes of these elected clods and that and you will pay for some idiot's right to pay $1,200/square foot to live in a concrete box and call it home.