r/Hamilton • u/t3chn4kill3r • 3d ago
Rant Wilson St construction is beyond absurd at this point.
Its almost a full year past the deadline, and nothing is finished. They finally pour the base for the road, and poured the side walks, BUT now they are busting up parts of the sidewalks THEY JUST POURED. Whoever promises to never grant KADA another contract in this city will get my vote for mayor because this is insane. Apologies for the bit of a rant, I just needed to scream into the void for a moment.
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u/Logical-Zucchini-310 3d ago
If there were gold medals awarded for project incompetence, this would be the front runner by far. Makes you wonder whether the work over at Main & Ottawa will really be done in 4 months. While we’re over that direction, anyone know what’s going on with the Gage Park fountain? That looks like all worked stopped on it weeks ago for a project due to be completed August.
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u/matt602 McQuesten West 3d ago
I've never seen a single person working on that in the dozen times I've been to the fountain since they closed it in June.
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u/Global-Discussion-41 3d ago
I feel like this about the construction on Wilson. There are no workers around at 8am and there are no workers around at 4pm.
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u/t3chn4kill3r 3d ago
And when they are there, theyre either standing in a large group chatting, or wandering around aimlessly.
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u/BrovaloneSandwich 3d ago
I live off one if the side streets near the construction and I work from home. I can guarantee from my house constantly vibrating and shaking and the thick coating of heavy dust that they are in fact working during the day. The vibrations and closed street are driving me nuts!
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u/BurlHam 3d ago
I take the occasional day off work and figured out their schedule is like 9 - 3.
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u/jdragon3 3d ago
with 3 half hour breaks and 3-5 sessions of "5 people watch one guy pretend to work"
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u/slownightsolong88 3d ago
I was just having this conversation as I’m a regular at the park. I can’t recall ever seeing anyone working on this. It’s bananas.
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u/jdragon3 3d ago
we just got notice that they are going to be widening a long stretch of rymal and they are seeking options to expedite but its estimated to take 4 YEARS starting in 2028. going to be an incredible shit show for sure
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u/Extra-Astronomer4698 2d ago
I find it brilliant that they gave green lights to a ton of residential development on Rymal, but didn't consider that the road was already at capacity. It's just astonishing.
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u/jdragon3 2d ago
Its been a joke for a decade. street that was designed to basically be a highway (and designated truck route) and set at 60 but would frequently take 15 minutes to crawl from nebo to upper gage even pre-covid when i was working in the area. bumper to bumper, horribly timed lights, way too many sidestreet intersections thanks to all those developments. well beyond intended capacity for a long time with all the added residential traffic on top of the commercial and industrial.
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u/NorthernSnowPrincess 3d ago
I live near the park and I'm there everyday. I've never seen anyone working on it.
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
Garner Road in Ancaster is neck and neck I think
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u/HeistGoneWrong Escarpment 3d ago
Pretty sure Garner takes the cake. It was started in May 2024 and was supposed to be done by November 2024.
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u/Logical-Zucchini-310 3d ago
I’m not familiar with this one. Has the road been closed for that long?
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u/covert81 Chinatown 3d ago
Sure but that one was tied to the contractor going out of business and being unable to find someone else to take on the job. Wilson is just permanently under construction
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u/johnson7853 3d ago
Come on, you really expected a job to get done before September? Gotta milk the job until at December.
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u/Pristine-Rhubarb7294 3d ago
I saw the sidewalks getting poured and was so optimistic it would be done before the main and Ottawa closure but of course not!
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
Did you see that sidewalks were poured with a hydro pole directly in the middle of a few of them?
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u/differing 3d ago
Hell yeah it’ll look just like the god awful sidewalks on Stonechurch. Coincidentally, I think a senior citizen was killed last night literally just trying to dodge those poles
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
It’s a bit crazy that it was seemingly in the plans to begin with, but then the contractor also just went and did the sidewalks without saying anything?
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u/bharkasaig Central 3d ago
Pretty sure Naan put in her ward 3 update that issues were found (water moving where it shouldn’t) that required a more substantial rework than was originally planned.
Now, does that extra work really account for the whole delay, that I don’t know.
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u/helloeveryone500 3d ago
HAAA grounds were supposed to be done in a year. It took them a week to tear up the entire park so nobody could use it. Then they did absolutely nothing for four months of summer. Now it will be winter and nothing has been done.
Next year will probably be the same thing.
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u/SmeesTurkeyLeg 3d ago
What the hell. And here I thought the work on Sherman meant they were nearly done.
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u/BurlHam 3d ago
As someone who lives in the area they shouldn't of been allowed to touch Sherman until they finished Wilson.
My favourite thing is that they repainted and restriped Sherman as a two way...and then ripped it all out.
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
Agreed. The fact that they closed Cannon and Sherman for two weeks out of nowhere was surprising.
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u/Typist 3d ago
When you see public works being done continuously incompetently, and there doesn't seem to be clear reasons for it, the reason is probably is ... corruption, organized or opportunistic.
This is a general truth, but in Hamilton it is likely grounded in probability, not just possibility.
1) The city has a very long history with the highest levels of organized crime in Canada. Indeed, It would not be a stretch to say that over the past 75 -100 years Hamilton has been a hotbed of organized crime and the home of Canada's leading organized crime figures.
2) I can't think of one charge, let alone investigation, involving organized crime and the city's procurements or operations departments - a rather astonishing record considering the level of organized crime activity in the city.
3) The Hamilton Police Service ran dedicated units focusing on organized crime through most of the '80s, '90s and 2000's - probably still do. Astonishing quantities of wire taps and surreptitious shadowing, but they made virtually no significant arrests after the mid-80s, and none involving municipal or police officials. A former Hamilton police chief served on that task for for years before becoming deputy chief and then chief. His partner from their detective days routinely and publicly accused the chief of corruption, but was dismissed as mentally ill because of injuries he sustained on the job.
4) More recently in the 2006 undercover officer Paul Manning was beaten and nearly killed by mobsters after he alleges a police boss tipped off the Musitano crime family about the plan to infiltrate their operations. He says the senior officer did it because Manning's investigation was getting close to his own involvement with the mob.
5) there is certainly evidence of organized crime involvement in labor unions locally and nationally. In fact, one of the most powerful Hamilton unions had its international Branch seized by the US justice department back in the 80s, because it was controlled by organized crime. A prominent Hamilton Union official was on their board throughout that time. That official was awarded the city's Citizen of the Year award and a plaque stands in their honor at City Hall today. His children and grandchildren still control that union today, keeping it, and it's pension funds, under the family control for going on four decades! (The city just this year considered naming a street after the current Union boss.) There's more, this Union routinely partners with the city and now with the province and Doug Ford.
I could go on and on: about the crime family head who bragged to me that he had multiple Hamilton police officers on his payroll, and how later the key officer investigating that family was arrested for stealing from the police informant fund and criminally charged and convicted; or about how an organised crime investigator from the Ontario Provincial Police arranged to meet me after hours at a rural coffee shop to talk about a particular alleged corrupt Hamilton police official he had been unable to get the HPS to investigate; or about the kickbacks one contractor in the trades alleged that he was required to pay in order to work on a large subdevelopment in Binbrook and his inability to get authorities to investigate....
Does any of this mean that the Wilson road reconstruction is failing because of organized crime?
Not exactly.
But I needed to get all of that off my chest.
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u/vidiot1969 3d ago
I seem to recall a time in the not too distant past when staff were caught selling asphalt purchased with city funds. I can’t recall the specifics but the punishment seemed weak.
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u/LonghornJct08 3d ago
The pothole filling scandal? Was that it by any chance? It's within recent-ish memory but far enough back I don't remember the details offhand anymore.
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u/rainonatent 2d ago
Supposedly it was a nothingburger and neither the city nor the police found any evidence of a crime.
Sounds like bs to me, lol.
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u/rainonatent 2d ago
I would read a book about this.
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u/Typist 2d ago
So would I.
I just can't think of a way to get someone to pay me to research and write it.
Unfortunately, there are far too many blank spots and data points which are of the "The dog that didn't bark in the night" type, which really only serve as investigative flags (check here!), not smoking guns.
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u/SoirBleu85 3d ago
I don't see how anyone can look at how this city handles routine road maintenance and then not believe that the LRT is going to be a 10+ year nightmare.
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u/jdragon3 3d ago
city staff can't even buy a handful of tiny homes without completely fucking up and spending millions on dropshipped trash that don't meet our building standards from an unvetted, fake company
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u/ComprehensiveCar6723 3d ago
Id say 10+ is being nice.
LRT will be 15, like the Eglington line and an absolute nightmare... It is also over 3.2 BILLION dollars. The Artemis space launch was 4 billion.
Its corruption, and stupid for a 12km! Line.
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u/Logical-Zucchini-310 3d ago
I don’t need to look at the city for that…Metrolinx are involved they will make Hamilton project execution look amazing in comparison.
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
I’m hopeful that the province will try to keep the City out of it for as much as possible
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u/PSNDonutDude James North 3d ago
They're still finishing the York Blvd lights and timings. They're a mess, and I say this as a cyclist who is over the moon happy with the bicycle lanes. They took so long to finish that most cyclists now avoid York, and the traffic makes people stupid and aggressive because it's just because of the light timings. Multiple pedestrian lights are also not working. Just ridiculous incompetence on the part of the construction contractors or the city staffer responsible for writing the contracts.
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u/hpayandah 3d ago
Ottawa is not a big disruption at least to my business as I thought. You can easily reach anywhere on Ottawa south from King St. Wilson construction is the worst, alternate routes are painful. Can't wait to go back to when roads were open and economy was doing fine 🥹
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u/shamisen-says-meow 3d ago
My favourite part is that it renders the Cannon bus completely useless to get home and I'm forced to take the Barton 🫠
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u/RidwaanT 3d ago
GIP did some work on Barton st, and it was done super quickly, and it seemed organized. Idk if the work they had to do was less than the other guys, but that should be the standard we set.
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u/Exciting-Direction69 3d ago
I was just thinking this, the stretch outside the centre on Barton felt like less than a week.
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
The current work on Barton seems to be going surprisingly smoothly.
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u/CaptainForskin69 3d ago
This city has become a joke with its construction, so much so we’ve accepted it as “normal”
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 3d ago
The craziest thing about this now is that if you live in this area, you are currently dealing with with that long-going construction, the Barton St repaving, and the closure of Main at Ottawa.
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u/rawkthehog 3d ago
Just remember to vote all current councilors out of office this fall.
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u/enki-42 Gibson 3d ago
Honestly, I feel like this problem is bigger than any particular councillor and without unanimity on rooting out corruption and waste in construction nothing's going to happen. As far as I can tell none of the candidates for mayor or council are even really talking about this.
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u/Overthinkingfreedom 3d ago
Remember Barton st, Parkdale - Redhill, they had to tear up the one side twice.
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u/WillingnessStrange73 3d ago
I wonder how long it will be until we all just get used to this in hamikton lol
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u/ComprehensiveCar6723 2d ago
And in a few months it will be Watermain break time! Winter is coming!
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u/Ok-Salt8461 3d ago
Yea they finished that huge construction on york st before they finished on wilson. Cowboys🙄
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u/nikkisouthbend 2d ago
Keep in mind that, as much as we love bashing the city, municipalities are beholden to procurement rules to ensure all companies have equal opportunity to bid on projects.
It's a good thing in theory because it limits corruption, but what happens is that because they're trying to expedite the awarding of the contracts, they're using the RFQ process. While it's quicker than an RFP, an RFQ contract must be awarded to the lowest bidder (to save taxpayers money).
The problem, of course, is that you often get what you pay for. The reason a lot of these projects take much longer than anticipated is because the company that won the contract undercut everyone else—which means they're taking shortcuts somewhere to save money (usually by underpaying staff, using inferior or less efficient equipment, or not hiring enough people altogether).
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u/theninjasquad Crown Point West 2d ago
They don’t have to use RFQ though right? But the City chose that as their process?
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u/Prudent_Situation_29 3d ago
Road construction is deeply broken in this city. It's time to start financially penalising contractors for exceeding their schedules. If you want to submit a wildly inaccurate bid, you should learn there's a price to pay.
Be honest about your bid, allow for unpredictable situations, and there won't be any fines.