Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of those “$500 stairs”-type projects in my field. Why spend $5000 on an app when your cousin or a college student can do it for $1000?
Or perhaps you can get that student to do it for $1000, then have it cost you $2000 in lost sales when things break, and then pay me $8000 to fix it. That’s a surprisingly popular choice.
Just because something can be done cheaper doesn’t mean it should be done cheaper. Let’s say you can do those stairs for $2000 and then they break and a single child gets seriously injured. One of her parents has to take time off work, which is a productivity loss of $10,000. The child needs her leg to be operated on which is covered by insurance, but results in a cost of $25,000. The stairs need to be redone for $65,000. How much have you saved exactly?
And yes, it’s possible that the $550 stairs would be there for a long time. Flimsy stairs of untreated lumber on a steep hill in Canadian weather. Sure, it could happen. But I’d rather pay the $2 more in taxes to get them done properly.
“We just can’t have people decide to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have, because how am I supposed to get my kickbacks from the contractors?"
Maybe specialists are paid too much? Homeless people are literally dying every year in Toronto during the winter months because the city refuses to build more shelters. I’d rather see the city not build extravagant staircases if it means lives can be saved.
I would strongly advise you to pre-screen each episode. In addition to the not-infrequent nudity (male and female), which i don’t personally think is much of an issue, there is some really seriously twisted humor in there. I’m thinking mainly of the undertaker’s sketch, wherein the undertakers convince the dearly departed’s grieving son to cook and eat the corpse.
One issue with this is that even knowing well what is needed is part of that $65K. For example, they’ll need to get experts out to figure out, based on the soil/rock profile of the area and the ways that the freeze/thaw cycle affect things, how deep and what kind of support will need to be installed. This is just one of the things that need to be studied, and hence paid for, before a single design is drawn up.
Guy should have just built them and not told anyone… Something is better than nothing as long as you know the risks, but they clearly aren’t up to standard (and you really should be making a ramp while you’re at it). This is the type of story that local news loves because it fulfills your ‘intuition’ that government is, like, a total rip-off man! It’s more complicated than that.
The stairs are to a community garden. Obviously, the city must have approved the community garden, so they already have their hand in it. If people are being injured on their way to/from the community garden, then there is an existing problem that the city must address. They are liable for all of those injuries so far. It’s possible, depending on the structure of the city government, that there is another entity besides the council or the planning board who can state that a temporary walkway is sanctioned, and leave this one in place. It could be the health dept, or a safety officer, or a fire chief, or building inspector or somebody like that. So, there are positive ways forward. But the city councilman on that video needs to lead the way and start thinking of solutions.
But that would be filthy socialism! It is the government’s duty to atone for the sin of existing by outsourcing at every opportunity, especially the ones that make no sense whatsoever.
