I Think I’ve Seen This Movie
When thinking about the Trail to Nowhere it seemed to me that I had seen this same sort of thing before. Then it struck me. Of course.
An expensive and unnecessary project that dragged out for years, and that was supposed to be paid for with other people’s money, “free money” as it is known in City Hall, I recalled.
I remembered because I wrote about it, here. The second elevator towers at the Fullerton train station, a project so ridiculously over-engineered, so expensive, so reliant on phony ridership projections and so expensive and mismanaged that it ended up raiding Fullerton’s own Capital Budget to the tune of $600,000. In the end no one knows how much was actually spent on that boondoggle when everything was said and done. But one good thing that came out of it was teaching me to appreciate how things are done in Fullerton, and how there isn’t one cent’s worth of accountability on the part of anybody.
If the Trail to Nowhere actually ever gets built but is way over budget, unused, unmaintained and falls into decrepitude, who will stand up to take responsibility? Not the City Council who approved it without question. Not City staff – the chief architects of this disaster in-waiting are already gone – nor will the City Manager, who will be gone as soon as his pension formula tops him out. None of the people stirred up to insult and harangue the City Council will be in evidence and the proprietors of the Fullerton Observer, if they are still around annoying people, will not be searching for those accountable. No one else will be, either.
Remember the multi-million dollar Poison Park intergenerational fiasco? Has anybody ever taken responsibility for that poster child of bureaucratic incompetence and political indifference? Of course not. That would be a horrible precedent. Fullerton.
There is no shame. None at all. Not on the part of staff and not on the part of the City Council.
Absolutely right. Going back to the bad old Redevelopment days there has been a string of disasters with no repercussions for those responsible.
Remember the concrete trestles on Harbor? Remember Knowlwood corner? Remember the Chinese seafood restaurant? Remember Ajit Mithawala and the bum box? The Bank of Italy fiasco? What about the Corporate Yard construction debacle? Millions of gallons of water leaking out of Laguna Lake?
The elevators have provided is a place for the homeless to urinate and defecate when the bathrooms are closed. You can’t put a price tag on that kind of value!
It’s been what 25 years since the City Council voted to build a bridge with elevators over the tracks at the Depot? I remember pretty vividly, a friend of mine at the time tried very hard to convince the City Council to take a different approach and go under the tracks with a design to build a pedestrian underpass. Equipped with ADA ramps and concrete stairs on both sides of the tracks. Half the cost of designing and building the bridge that needed two (2) elevators, one on each side.
Then twenty years later they added two (2) additional elevators, one on each side of the bridge.
Then two (2) years after the elevators were added the steel stairs on both sides of the tracks had to be removed and replaced because the metal stair structures were completely rusted and disintegrating. That alone must have cost half a million bucks.
Too bad the City Council didn’t listen to my friend. They would have saved millions by now just on maintenance cost alone.
My friend was a quasi homeless dude and think he was ignored because he didn’t wear a suit and a tie. He sure had a good idea. Oh well.
The treads on the “new” stairs are already all fucked up. The new elevators look as decrepit as the old ones.
I remember the first bridge. The Heritage group fought to go underground because they bridge was an eyesore.
Second verse, same as the first.
What happened to those Restrooms, playground equipment, Gazebo, basketball court, sidewalks, grass, trees, etc…..? Gone, gone, gone. Thank you City for wasting our tax dollars. Please Sir, may I have another?
Imagine how much exercise commuters get going up 3 stories instead of down 1.