Quote:
Originally Posted by WilsonFourTwo
Are you ting me? We're not talking about who the Mayor's official barber gets to be or where to buy a couple $100,000 sanding trucks. We're talking about 5 Million dollar jobs for permanent infrastructure. And you're telling me that in the time the fancy-pants bridge designer was envisioning the Chinese finger-trap, Ellis Don couldn't have come up with a bid?
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Ummmm, I said a project of this scope should go to a competitive bid.
My larger point being that this whole audit may probably lead to an overreaction with EVERYTHING having to go to a competitive bid, which would create the opposite problem.
Again, people claim this is some kind of corruption, but corruption is handing out cushy contracts to friends and donors. Last time I checked, Santiago Calatrava is a spanish architect and structural engineer who has nothing to do with the the senior bureaucrat that drove this project. He was selected specifically for this project because of his technical expertise for such a challenging bridge design and his international reputation for delivering the highest level of design on earth. CMLC did an international competition for its bridge for St Patrick's Island and I would argue that very few (realistically costed) designs even can be mentioned in the same sentence as the Peace Bridge (which I think is a gorgeous structure - I know this is totally subjective) or any other Calatrava bridge in quality. I'm sorry, but Ellis Don is a contractor, not an architect and structural engineering firm.