I know, I know, sometime this year they are going to pave Main Street West in front of the Longyear building but that is no excuse for the condition of that section of an entrance to our city. The only word I can find for the pot-holed asphalt around that new four-way stop is a disgrace. How can any Road Supervisor and his crew(s) leave that section of street in such a condition for the past month? Do they not have any pride of workmanship?
And please do not tell me there is no money to repair the roads. If one small department can find enough money to create a new position after the budget has passed, they, and other departments, can dig into their slush funds and transfer the money to the pot-hole repair account. No, I do not believe it is a lack of funds but a lack of a sense of responsibility to do a good job of work.
How can any crew go along Lakeshore Drive patching holes and walk by every third or fourth pothole and not fix it? It is bad enough to have these potholed entrances to our little city in such shape and have all the excuses ready. Because, because. . . oh yes, it was a hard winter and the frost was in the ground and it rained a lot and the paving crews will be around filling in those white outlined holes sometime this fall, perhaps before freeze-up. But explain the mess on Worthington and Ferguson where one side of Worthing was patched and the other side left full of holes and ruts. Did break time interrupt the work or did the supervisor just not care enough to move the truck across the intersection?
Everyone will have stories about how bad their street is but we have had the time to fix those streets if there had been the will to do it. It would be convenient to blame Council or even the Mayor for the abject state of our roads but they have had their share of blame over the past months with the Arena and the L’Ami fiasco. It’s time to look down the corporate ladder to find what is happening to our city. I certainly hope they do not blame the man or woman shovelling the cold mix out of the back of the truck.
There was a time when employees would look back at the end of the day and ask themselves if they had done a good day’s work, not only in quantity but in quality. It was not to justify their wage but to be personally satisfied with the result. No one could be satisfied with the mess on Main Street West.
