Some people just find government action towards public works to be so slow, that it comes to a point that they do the project themselves. Regardless if they are engineers or tradesmen.
That’s the case of Adi Astl, a resident of Toronto, who noticed that it was taking the city too long to build a stair at a hilly area near a community garden, which is managed by his gardening group.
Astl is after the safety of his group. One of them had broken a wrist falling down the hill leading to their community garden.
Already impatient about the slow progress of the project, he took the matter on his own hands and engineered some wooden stairs. This only cost him $550, which is a hundred times cheaper than what the city had estimated for the job at $65,000 to $150,000.
Photo via CTV News
He built eight steps that is safe enough for him and his colleagues to walk on. Astl got the help of a homeless man to finish the work.
CTV News reported that members of his gardening group at the Tom Riley Park thanked him for building the stairs.
“To me, the safety of people is more important than money. If the city is not willing to do it, I have to do it myself,” Astl said.
Photo via CTV News
But the government later removed the stairs after the government said that it was not built according to the city’s regulations. The structure was declared unsafe according to a local Toronto radio station.
The city said that Astl should not have intervened in the project and just wait for the city officials to accomplish the stairs.
However, Mayor John Tory thought that the project cost estimate is indeed questionable; but he said that it does not condone private citizens bypassing city bylaws to build public structures themselves.
“We just can’t have people deciding to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have,” Tory said in an interview with CTV.
Source: CNN
