[AdrianB1]

Cities are ran by politicians that in most cases are too incompetent to do anything better with their lives. When incompetent leaders make decisions, the incompetence is flowing to most, if not everything they do, including this kind of projects. There is no immediate fix for this situation, unless the decision would be made by some kind of city manager or board of experts that are recruited based on competence and held accountable for the results (up to prison, if needed). The old story with "politicians pay with their mandate, they will not be reelected if they fail" is a story for toddlers, that is not a punishment on par with the damages they make, will the Stockholm mayor pay back 100 million dollars?

[anm89]

I'm sure people will be lining up to take these board positions when the punishment for project failure is prison.

Maybe that's a little far, no?

[hutzlibu]

Or why not execute them instead? Worked very well for ages ...

More seriously, there usually are no simple solutions to complex problems. And government is a very complex problem. So many people with so many opinions - and everyone involved afraid to say one wrong word or make one wrong decision. I don't think more fear helps there.

I mean - prison for corruption - yes! But prison for incompetence, no. Then you also have to jail the people who put the incompetent person there in the first place and those people and so on.

[passerby1]

> prison for corruption - yes! But prison for incompetence, no.

And how to decide which is which? Effectively there's not much difference

[juskrey]

Just take back the salary when the city is net negative from their "experiments"

[hutzlibu]

Yeah, but would you like to have your salary reclaimed later on, if they are not satisfied with your work?

Could you do calmy your job then? Or would the anxiety made you even more prone to misstakes?

[Lionga]

Just make them responsible for the damages and it is no longer econimically viable to give projects to the bidder with the highest kickbacks but rather the ones that can acutally do the job.

[daniellarusso]

I agree with this, and have seen it first-hand.

Worse, I have seen not enough people run for open council positions, so anybody willing to fill out the paperwork can ‘win’ without anyone in town voting.