The day in corruption

Mayor Tremblay admitted Thursday that there’s corruption at city hall, but that it was entrenched before he got there. This runs counter to statements made about how the last ten years have been catastrophic, as Gilles Surprenant also said on Thursday, and a general allegation that corruption settled in and became a regular part of city hall operations during Tremblay’s time in office.

Anyone who thinks crooked politicians are sort of OK should consider the story of what happened on the Main as an example. Because of a deliberate omission of information on Surprenant’s part – the headline calls it a mistake, but the description makes it clear it was not anyone’s error but rather a deliberate bit of skulduggery – the work took much longer than expected. The fallout was not just the “loss to taxpayers” cited in the item, but all the closed shops and restaurants, the resulting lost jobs and lost human morale, and years of depressed activity around an area that still hasn’t fully recovered from the damage.

It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that similar scheming led to Park Avenue being dug up and repaved multiple times in some spots in more recent years.