Too many bureaucrats and construction profiteers, not enough good laborers.
The profiteers were the engineers that designed the system. Each time they screwed up, they got to bill us more hours. Also, the contract with them stipulates zero liability for their incompetence.
The state licensing board should be fired for allowing that.
Also, we wanted to put in a more environmentally friendly, cheaper, and more reliable road technology (specifically, a permeable road), but the county blocked us, then made us pay to put in drainage to mitigate the effects of the obsolete thing they stipulated. Both the mandated obsolete road technology and the drain design immediately failed. The state regularly uses the disallowed permeable technology in this area.
Since then, the county has approved similarly flawed designs at other sites, and the construction firm flat-out refuses to install them.
Civil Engineers DO NOT have the upper hand in any of their designs. They propose, and upper management comments, and they propose again, and upper management comments again, and back and forth it goes. At the end of the day, all they have done is manage a series of comments, and tried to please the client rep with something like a quick and dirty fix to whatever comments they are getting.
Who has the creativity? The client rep, but he is so incompetent/overloaded/unelated that all he does is either manage from high above, or just look for ways to protect himself and the City, or ask the consultant to propose solutions and makes the smallest comments possible on these solutions, while leaving majority of the comments for other offices.
This leads to designs that hardly get a fight history. And more of a sychophant-driven approach just to get nitpickers out of the way.
I don't think he meant that you have to do labor to add value.
>"First, an architect needs to draw plans for the toilet, which will then be presented to the public for feedback. The Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee will be responsible for conducting a “multi-phase review” of the project, like it does for all projects on public lands. According to the Arts Commission’s website, “the committee evaluates each project’s design, scale and massing for accessibility, safety and aesthetic merit.” The review process “ensures that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.”"
I recognize that the verbiage of this quote is probably standard for construction projects in the city, and it sounds absurdly out of place for a project of this scale. That being said, at some point our elected officials just need to delegate authority and let them act mostly autonomously.
Not to be glib, and I expect to be excoriated for such a comment, but I literally cannot think of a way to not be snarky: I believe what you're describing is called ownership.
Particularly in discussions of SF, I find this amazingly long road back to where we started: "If only there was some system where people with the most interest in a particular building could make their own choices!" - "If only people who owned land could build buildings on it!". That system exists - it's called private property.
Bureaucracy exists because no individuals have any ownership over any of this. The pipes and the surface of the sidewalk belong to different authorities - and dozens of oversight committees (the dreaded planning commission) have vague authority layered on top. If no one can own it, and we don't want authoritarian political power, then we have to accept that bureaucracy is simply the only way forward. There are no choices that are not somewhere on the line between "one person owns", "everyone owns" or "the king owns". We must make a choice - and if the choice is "libertarianism is stupid but ALSO authoritarianism is stupid" then hey, achingly slow bureaucracy is on the menu folks. We can't have our cake and eat it too.
This is really what the whole review is doing, attempting to make the design consistent with the surroundings, which is a worthy consideration. But literally re-inventing this wheel for every project id both wasteful and guaranteed to fail, as every committee will be different. Simply pick one or two, and maybe have a standing process to update it every decade.
Then, it's just specify function, dimensions, etc., and maybe "in SF-City Style A", and put it out to bid, and passe it through maybe one or two approval processes to verify compliance before digging, or even include that in the bidding process - submit your design & costs, meeting these standards. IFF the process is good and fair, they should get many good bidders (ya, big IFF).
Sounds a lot like the representative democracy that created this mess in the first place.
Not enough wages. If the free market is good enough for everything else, why not for labor?
Profiteering from subcontractors and suppliers is the issue. All of these bids are public, this isn't exactly forbidden knowledge.
Union labor is really expensive. It cost my neighbor who is part owner of the SF ferry building wine shop, over $8K to install a TV set because it had to be done with union labor. And get this, he was not allowed to install it himself because of union rules.
I have another neighbor that works as a location scout for movies and commercials. He says all filming in SF has to be done by union workers and its much more expensive than filming outside SF.