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Photo by Jon Willing

“The reality is if we hadn’t met that timeline, the project wouldn’t have happened,” Chenier said.

Therefore, Hughes’ report says, Chenier’s team didn’t document the meetings and decisions it made (which really shouldn’t have been that time-consuming, should it have?), didn’t tell Sinking Ship’s people that they were lobbying for special treatment and needed to record it (ditto) and didn’t recognize that spending $1 million on the biggest playground in the city really demanded some kind of public consultation first. By the time the city told anybody what was up, the location and budget and most of the elements had already been decided.

All of that is correct, Chenier said. In the future, they’ll do things differently. To be precise, because this is how people at city hall talk, Chenier promised that “any go-forward piece will include an integrated piece that will address public consultation.”

Which would mean, to be clear, no playground.

“I don’t think we could have delivered a construction start in July (2016) with all those things in place,” Chenier said outside the meeting. They’d have written up a report to city council laying out the offer, asked for permission to take it up, run public meetings last fall, asked for another council vote and started construction this past spring.

As it is, the playground isn’t quite finished even though the city and Sinking Ship worked on it all last summer. The rainy spring kept finishing touches on hold for weeks. Some pieces of equipment have yet to go in, they’re replacing a black plastic slide that could burn kids, and the space around the playground itself needs to be filled in with soil and topped off with sod. That’ll take until the end of this July if they’re lucky, mid-August if they aren’t. There’s no big opening ceremony planned at all, let alone one that was supposed to happen July 1.