‘I want to address the comparisons that have been made between the 2013 flood and how that crisis was managed versus this one,’ says Mayor Gondek
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Mayor Jyoti Gondek must be getting tired of hearing it.
It might even bug her.
Don’t know what other reason would explain why the mayor brought it up Thursday.
You do hear it all the time.
Folks comparing, and not in a good way, Mayor Gondek’s performance in this busted pipe water crisis to how former mayor Naheed Nenshi conducted himself in the much, much, much bigger flood of 2013.
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It’s been a week since Gondek went on TV after the pipe ruptured and played the blame game taking aim at the provincial government and the federal government and making it seem like poor Calgary city hall just didn’t have enough money.
Gondek called the province and feds out for not paying enough attention to Calgary’s needs.
This past Sunday, facing outrage, familiar territory for the mayor, Gondek said sorry on behalf of city hall for poor communications and promised to do better.
Not sure she said sorry for playing politics but I digress.
Fast forward to Thursday.
We hear about two workers injured at the site where the pipe ruptured.
We hear about Calgarians not doing enough to cut their use of water.
We hear about how one day we will have all the answers and there will be a review to understand what happened and why.
That review will be headed up by someone independent from city hall. Right? Right?
We don’t know.
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Gondek says she realizes everyone has questions on why and how the pipe burst. It took some time to get that lightbulb to turn on.
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Then, without being questioned and without any prompting and out of the blue, Gondek takes us on a trip down memory lane.
“I want to address the comparisons that have been made between the 2013 flood and how that crisis was managed versus this one.”
Who is making these comparisons? Guess the word has got back to the mayor.
Yes, the 2013 flood.
Even many people who don’t like former mayor Naheed Nenshi or his politics will concede he did a good job rallying the city at the time.
Now Gondek has managed to even get those who have very little good to say about Nenshi pining away for the days when he was a leader for the city in an emergency far bigger than the one today.
On Thursday Gondek explains how in 2013 there was a state of local emergency.
That state of local emergency allows the mayor and council to work with city higher-ups “as the crisis communications comes in and decisions are made.”
“In June 2013 the mayor was in a better position to provide constant and clear communication from the outset.”
So that’s why Nenshi was successful. Hmmm …
Now, says Gondek, there is no active state of emergency in place so she talked to city hall boss bureaucrat David Duckworth, not once but twice, about communicating better.
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In the afternoon at the city’s Emergency Operations Centre, Gondek is asked why she thought it was important to talk about comparing today and the 2013 flood.
“That question has been posed. It’s been asked,” says the mayor.
She repeats how a state of emergency is different from what exists now.
“That’s why there was a different flow of information to the mayor in 2013 at that time.”
Now it is Sue Henry, the chief of the city’s emergency management along with the city’s operations teams, who is taking the lead.
Not Gondek.
“We are looped in as council as information becomes available to us but the lead on this is the chief and the operations crews.”
Where is Sue Henry? There she is, under the bus. Or is she?
Gondek is quick to say city hall has very good people.
“I’m not interested in blaming anyone for any type of a communications failure. I’m the mayor. It’s my responsibility to communicate with Calgarians.”
Exactly one year ago, Nenshi shared his memories with Postmedia 10 years after the flood.
In much worse circumstances, Nenshi was out and about in this city. Visible.
He wasn’t an expert in dealing with emergencies but Nenshi said he figured he could talk to people and could help people work to a common goal.
That has little to do with whether or not there was a state of emergency.
What was his secret?
“We tried to put ourselves in the shoes of citizens and to again trust them.
“We told people everything we knew, in multiple settings and channels, and explained why we made the decisions we did,” recalled Nenshi.
“We told people everything.”
Whatever the man’s city hall track record, and this scribbler has a laundry list of criticisms, as the 11th anniversary of the flood is upon us it seems we are a million miles away.
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