Let’s step back from Calgary’s fiscal cliff edge

Thankfully, I’ve never suffered from migraines. But that thud, thud, thud might have been similarly debilitating.

Certainly, it was relentless. And if it was annoying for my wife and me, across the Bow River in Fish Creek Provincial Park, heaven knows what the poor folk living along the ridge in Douglasdale and Mckenzie Lake must have been going through.

For the last few years, the peace and tranquillity of a mid-week walk in that particular slice of nature as most Calgarians were at work — the upside of not getting a regular paycheque — was usually disturbed by the city’s battle to prevent two dozen homes sliding off a cliff.

The pile-driving equipment, pummelling massive stakes into the ground along a 3 ½-kilometre stretch of clifftop, was bad enough, watching and hearing from a distance, so heaven knows what anyone living in the neighbourhoods must have gone through.

What a boondoggle, I remember thinking. Why would anyone build houses that close to a cliff edge on ground that was obviously closer to sandstone than it ever would be to granite? And what about the poor folk who lived there? Who would be daft enough to buy their homes now, even if they tried to flee the endless din and dirt and start afresh somewhere else?

A couple of years later, it turns out I was mostly right, though at the time I thought it somehow must be erosion from the Bow far below causing the issue. Actually, it transpires that rain is responsible. In a weird way, that seems worse. Heck, it’s been raining here on planet Earth for so long that even our city’s planners should have cottoned on. Or maybe they don’t get out much.

Anyhow this situation has now become newsworthy. Because, after the usual behind-closeddoors

Of course, councillors and the mayor are now looking around for someone else to blame.

debate about how to save homes doing a swan dive into the abyss below, the cost of this two-year pile-driving project has emerged: a whopping $28 million.

And, call me cynical if you must, but I have a feeling the final tally isn’t yet done, dusted and filed away as effortlessly as a Joe Magliocca luncheon chit.

Of course, councillors and the mayor are now looking around for someone else to blame.

“How did we end up in this mess?” asks the mayor.

Isn’t that a bit like Nero finally putting down his fiddle to ask why no one bothered to call the fire brigade?

Anyhow, councillors were told it’s likely that too much time has gone by to recoup any money from the neighbourhoods’ developer.

Oh, but we’re reassured things have changed when it comes to approving building along slopes and escarpments, so this won’t happen again.

Really? One wonders what the rules were before this debacle. Did anyone among our civic planners ever listen to the story of the three little pigs as a kid? Or were they too busy, even then, calculating how much a defined-benefit pension would pay out at retirement?

So, unlike the 24 homes in question, that

$28 million of ratepayer cash in question has indeed slipped off that fiscal, due-diligence cliff, tumbling down to rest atop the heaped debris of other noteworthy examples of civic stupidity.

OK, what’s done is done and what’s lost isn’t coming back. But can city hall please learn from this?

There are major civic projects on deck, from the Green Line to the new hockey and entertainment arena to a potential refit for the theatre district. Yet no one has any clue what Calgary will be like in 12 months’ time.

Murphy Oil is the latest — but unlikely the last — energy company to bid us farewell and the myriad small businesses, currently closed because of the pandemic, are in serious harm’s way. Meanwhile, unemployment is already through the roof while the city is essentially broke.

So let’s take a step back from these particular financial cliff edges.

Things have changed. It’s time our civic leaders accepted that reality.