London City Council voted earlier this week to “find” the money needed to bridge the gap between the budgeted funds for sprucing up the Veterans’ Memorial Parkway, and the single bid received in answer to the city’s request for tenders.

As I wrote in last week’s Voice, I support doing more to acknowledge the service and sacrifice of our vets- but not just for them. It is vitally important to the long-term survival of our society that we never forget it wasn’t handed to us on a platter, it was earned by the blood, sweat and tears of those who fought to build, maintain and protect it.

So I have no problem with spending the money. But I have a huge problem with spending public money unnecessarily, for anything.

The warning bells should have gone off when there was only one bid for the job. that meant one of four likely things:

1. The request for bids was way out of line, or
2. Not enough people were aware of it, or
3. The job was too specialized for most landscape companies, or
4. There is so much work out there that landscape companies couldn’t be bothered responding.

The first explanation is a good bet – government requests for proposal are often not drawn as clearly as they might be in the private sector, which sometimes leads to unreasonable expectations of what things should cost.

The second is certainly possible.

The third isn’t very likely. With all due respect to landscapers, many of whom are quite talented and good at what they do, the Parkway job didn’t require brain surgeons.

And I can tell you from speaking with friends in the business that the fourth just isn’t true. Times are tough, herbicide bans have hurt some companies quite badly and there are always new people fighting for work.

So what did happen? What went wrong? It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that nobody on council apparently suggested that re-issuing the RFP might be in order. And if it was “too late” to do so, as has been suggested to me, then how is it that Council had to approve “finding” the “extra” money on such short notice.

If it wasn’t, then why didn’t they do so before voting to raid other projects for the dough? They can’t say they hadn’t heard of the idea- it was on the radio and in the pages of the Voice and I know for a fact many of them monitor both.

I suspect, and I would be genuinely relieved to hear I’m wrong, that they couldn’t be bothered because they didn’t have to. And I don’t think that’s any kind of attitude to have when you’re dealing with public funds.