After weeks away from city hall, the Mayor and council couldn’t even make it an hour back in session before the entire chamber devolved into a bitch match with insults, threats of ejection and demands for apologies.

Years of terrible, self-centered leadership from Naheed Nenshi as Mayor has created the most toxic and dysfunctional city hall that Calgary has ever seen.

Business crushing tax increases as high as 400% last spring finally managed to force the Mayor and council to admit that they had a crisis on their hands. With weeks of fighting and disparate plans, they dumped an order upon city administration to cut $60 million in spending (a drop in the bucket). City administration of course cut in the most painful of front line spots in hopes of souring Calgarians on any future spending restraint.

Meanwhile businesses continue to fail and downtown languishes with nearly 30% commercial vacancy.

Having kicked the fiscal can down the road, the Mayor and council then focused on pressing issues such as increasing the network of underutilized bike tracks in downtown and public art.

Meanwhile businesses continue to fail and downtown languishes with nearly 30% commercial vacancy.

Since city administration has proven itself to be utterly incapable of reasonably reigning in the out of control spending of city hall, Jeromy Farkas proposed a common sense solution of creating a “blue book” system which could help target areas of spending waste. This would be a listing of all city expenditures over $10,000 which the public would be able to access. Taxpayers will be far more effective at identifying spending waste than city administrators who are only concerned with feathering their own nests while not rocking the boat.

As usual, the Mayor and his collection of city council mushrooms dog piled on Farkas. They pointed to some gormless, weak motion that Diane Colley-Urquhart tabled last spring which they intend to talk about at the end of the month. In light of this, they voted down Jeromy’s motion.

Meanwhile businesses continue to fail and downtown languishes with nearly 30% commercial vacancy.

High spending city hall bloat supporters Shane Keating and Ward Sutherland chimed in of course.

Sutherland hates how Jeromy’s relentless pursuit of city reform exposes Ward’s goal of riding out a simple quiet few terms in office in order to collect a generous pension. Sutherland attacks Farkas at every possible opportunity. Parasites always lash out when one tries to dislodge them.

Keating yelped on about how categorizing all that spending would actually be wasteful in itself. This would really not take much effort folks. This is simply a cowardly dodge by a freespending councilor who doesn’t want the accumulated city waste exposed while he was on watch

There is a fiscal crisis in the city of Calgary. The Mayor and council dedicate the majority of their time pursuing vanity projects and embroiled in petty fights with each other while pretending that problems aren’t happening.

It will take nothing less than a flush of at least 80% of council in the next election to fix this mess.

Let’s just hope that the core of city businesses is still salvageable by that point.