Please notice the corporate entity which produced the video... none other than Parsons Brinckerhoff.
A little about Parsons Brinckerhoff:
TAKEN FOR A RIDE
By Tara Servatius
The last time two of the consultants overseeing Mecklenburg County's light rail and mass transit plan worked on a large-scale project together, they were responsible for an 80-foot sinkhole, thousands of lawsuits totaling over $1 billion, and a trail of fraud and corruption so long that even the FBI couldn't untangle it. Now they're advising Charlotte Area Transit Officials on our transit plan and helping to design it.
The two design, construction and engineering firms, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, Parsons Transportation Corp., and their smaller business units are directly responsible for projects widely regarded as the biggest transit debacles in the nation's history. Both have stark histories of deceiving the public and government officials about the true costs of transit projects, and then benefiting directly from project cost overruns.
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Boston's Notorious "Big Dig"
In 1998, before Parsons Brinckerhoff, Quade & Douglas prepared Charlotte-Mecklenburg's first transit plan for voter approval, the company, in a joint venture with another firm called Bechtel Civil Inc., oversaw the design and construction of Boston's Big Dig. The legendary project, a multi-billion dollar effort to bury 7.5 miles of Boston's central artery roadway underground, would eventually become the mother of all US transportation project fiascos. While the project was highly complex and didn't involve light rail like Charlotte-Mecklenburg's transit plan does, the fraud and cost overruns that have come to be associated with Big Dig have made national news -- and call into question the corporate practices of the company that to date has played a major guiding role in our own city's transit plan. In 1985, when Bechtel-Parsons Brinckerhoff was hired to oversee it, the project had an estimated cost of $2.6 billion and a completion date of 1998. Today, the project has a projected completion date of 2005, and its price tag has ballooned to $14.6 billion and climbing. And that doesn't even count the millions of dollars various state and federal agencies have spent on more than 15 separate investigations of the project's managers, which included Bechtel-Parsons Brinckerhoff, for shoddy design, construction and engineering, fraud and corruption.
Read the whole article. It gets much worse:
In 1995, the world watched as a massive sinkhole swallowed 80 feet of Hollywood Boulevard and buildings began to crack, buckle and sink several inches. In its wake, more than 1,000 lawsuits totaling more than a billion dollars in damages were filed against the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) by angry business and property owners. When the dust cleared, a forensic engineering firm hired by the MTA reported that EMC, an engineering partnership between principal partners Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas and a company called Daniel Mann Johnson & Mendenhall, had signed off on the faulty digging plan blamed for the disaster.
The company was recently acquired by the British firm Balfour Beatty, a firm with its own questionable ethical practices.
Are we really to trust the Heart of the City of Seattle to companies who have no interest in the safety and fiduciary interests of its citizens?
The video produced by PB shows the dangers of corporate propaganda on public policy, not just nationally, but locally.
This is not about the Mayor's race in Seattle. It is about making sound judgements outside of corporate influence for our community: in Seattle, in Boston, in Egypt... everywhere.
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