I have a Bachelor of Engineering degree and a MBA and currently manage an investment portfolio.

I am running for Alderman because I find mismanagement annoying, especially when I’m asked to pay for it. The incumbent, Mr. Penner, has been on council for 22 years. That also means he has participated in every major mistake City Council has authorized during those years.

I am sure you are familar with the “Law of Untended Consequences.”  This is when you make a casual decision only to later discover it had unintended, often expensive consequences.  It isn’t that these consequences couldn’t have been foreseen, it’s that we didn’t put sufficient thought into the problem and failed to see them.

There has been far too much poor planning in Saskatoon and poor planning is the quick route to unintended consequences.

The 51st Street overpass was planned to connect the East and West North industrial area over Idylwyld Drive and ease the load on the 42nd Street. That was what was intended and achieved.

But it did more. It concentrated traffic and brought it to the Ave C and Circle Drive intersection. You already had heavy traffic on Circle Drive, now you had heavy traffic coming in from the North.

The result was chaos. This intersection had the highest accident rate in the city and traffic backed up every time there was an accident. Fixing this intersection became a priority.

This was caused by poor planning. Who in City Hall has the foresight to protect the citizens from these mistakes and “The Law of Unintended Consequences”

When Saskatchewan Place (now CUC) was built out in the boondocks who looked at the layout of the roads and parking lots and said:

 “How do we get 11,000 people in or out of here smoothly and safely.”

“What is the capacity of these roads?”

“How long will it take to fill or empty these parking lots?” 

The result has been chaos ever since the place opened.  Who in City Hall saw this problem coming and raised the alarm.  Other cities have facilities handling even much larger crowds and successfully plan to handle the people and the traffic.

Now, River Landing. This Mayor and Council came to office promising THEY would get something done. We have spent $82M and have little to show for it. The proposed commercial developments have fallen through. Now we are asked to hijack the Mendel Gallery to find more capital for the site. This will raise the taxpayer’s investment to $135M and ask us to dishonour the Mendel family in the process.

What voice in City Hall looked at this emerging disaster and suggested to our overreaching Mayor that it might be a good idea to limit his ambitions to the capacity of the taxpayer’s purse and the demands of good taste.