ASK THE BORED: If the ramps were wrong, why aren't you making a slapdash contractor pay to redo them?

I'm not sorry at all that I missed the following disjointed ADA ramp replacement chat at last week's Bored of Works meeting.

BOW chairman Warren Nash listened as Wes "Usual Engineer" Christmas updated the board about ongoing ramp replacements downtown, apparently tied to last year's paving-to-campaign-finance funding effort, but now necessitated by stringent federal standards prior to the implementation of the bastardization of the Speck two-way street plan.

Nash was unable to ask clearly if these new ramps had only recently been redone. Rather, he said that there had been "some talk" of them being only recently redone.

Christmas parried with a predictable "not sure," but feinted in the crowd-pleasing direction of blaming the utility monopolies.

City engineer Larry Summers quickly deflected potential pointed fingers by testifying to the unvarying veracity of the ramp slant inventory.

Then Nash got a bit more specific: Now he understands that some of the ramps were replaced only 2-3 years ago, so why would they need to be replaced again?

Summers and Christmas agreed that no matter when the ramps were last replaced, they must be replaced again, because that's the way things work when you're sucking campaign finance garnish from the feds.

The conversation ended there. Now, dear reader, can you formulate the questions you'd ask if you'd been in the room last week, and were allowed to query?

Something like this to start ...

"YOU ARE THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, AND HAVE BEEN FOR FIVE YEARS, AND NOTHING LIKE THESE RAMPS IS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN WITHOUT THE BOARD'S APPROVAL, SO RATHER THAN ASK BEFUDDLED QUESTIONS ABOUT WHEN AND HOW IT HAPPENED, DO YOU THINK JUST MAYBE YOU MIGHT LOOK BACK INTO YOUR OWN BOARD'S RECORDS AND FIND THE ANSWER?

And then the follow-up ...

"BECAUSE, IF UTILITY CONTRACTORS DID THE RAMPS WRONG, OR IF PAVING CONTRACTORS DID THEM WRONG, THEN SHOULDN'T THESE CONTRACTORS BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT THEY BOTCHED?" 

The latter is the question most ordinary people would ask, and we have no answer for it. There'll be another weekly BOW meeting today. Rinse, and repeat.