Purcell sculptures ‘honoured’ as waste of taxpayers’ money
Big sculptural badminton rackets installed in downtown’s Jack Purcell Park took honours in the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s annual awards for the worst wastes of taxpayer money.
The Citizen first told the story of the sculptures last spring. As part of a renovation of the park, the city commissioned light standards that doubled as public art. Recognizing the achievements of badminton champion Jack Purcell, the lights are big curved metal installations costing about $4,500 each.
The problem: The badminton player was from Guelph and had nothing much to do with Ottawa. The park is named after a Jack Purcell who lived in Centretown and was renowned for mending broken hockey sticks for the neighbourhood children. Once the lights’ designer realized the mistake, he recast the badminton rackets as “stylized trees” that just happen to look a lot like badminton rackets, with long skinny straight poles topped by oval loops.
The $45,000 sculptures didn’t win their category of wasteful municipal projects: Top honours there went to a Halifax councillor who used $25,000 from his office budget for an 18-foot talking Christmas tree he hoped would be a tourist attraction.
Other nominees in the category were a $9-million meeting centre by a Vancouver sewage plant, a $559,000 sculpture in Calgary that reflects and concentrates the sun’s rays until they’re dangerously hot, and the decision of Brampton’s former mayor to expense 44 IQ quizzes on her city phone.
The conservative group gave top marks in the provincial category to Ontario’s $1.9-billion installation of smart electricity meters, which hasn’t cut power consumption the way it was supposed to.
In the federal category, the winner was former Liberal MP and London mayor Joe Fontana, who gets a federal pension even though he was convicted last year of fraud for submitting an altered invoice so the House of Commons would reimburse him for a cost related to his son’s wedding.