Canadian television reports:
A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city's insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards.
Retired mechanic Adi Astl says he took it upon himself to build the stairs after several neighbours fell down the steep path to a community garden in Tom Riley Park, in Etobicoke, Ont. Astl says his neighbours chipped in on the project, which only ended up costing $550 – a far cry from the $65,000-$150,000 price tag the city had estimated for the job....
Astl says he hired a homeless person to help him and built the eight steps in a matter of hours...
Area resident Dana Beamon told CTV Toronto she's happy to have the stairs there, whether or not they are up to city standards.
"We have far too much bureaucracy," she said. "We don't have enough self-initiative in our city, so I'm impressed."
We expect that government-build projects are going to be more expensive and take longer, but more than 100 times more expensive really somehow makes the point emphatically.
Meanwhile, speaking of overpriced government-funded projects, the Port Authority's $4 billion Santiago Calatrava-designed transit hub at the Lower Manhattan World Trade Center site leaks in the rain.
