Readers probably don’t need any more proof that the mayor, city council and city administration are all obsessed —out-of-their-minds, blinders-on, completely, totally, utterly obsessed — with “green.”

But here’s another example anyway.

Last Tuesday, council was asked to require a percentage of the townhouses that will be constructed in the new Blatchford development to be “visitable.” Any of the apartments and condos in the high-density, anti-car neighbourhood going up on the old City Centre airport site will be visitable, but not the skinny townhouses.

“Visitable” is planner jargon for residences that can be entered easily by the disabled or others with mobility problems. It applies not just to those who want to live there, but those in wheelchairs or with walkers who might want to visit, too.

Councillors all nodded their compassion for the concept, but said “no,” there’s no room in the Blatchford vision for visitability subsidies, no matter how noble a goal that is.

Now this Tuesday, council will have to make a decision about what kind of heating system it wants to install in Blatchford.

Will it authorize a $98.1-million system that reduces the greenhouse gas emissions of Blatchford by 74% over a traditional development with a similar number of residents? Or will it opt for one costing $206.7 million that saves 77%?

Really!? The administration is presenting this as though it were a real choice. But it should be obvious to everyone what this is all about.

It’s a scheme by council and the administration to pull one over on taxpayers. It’s an attempt to sell voters on a crazy plan by standing it up next to a totally insane plan, just so the merely crazy one looks reasonable by comparison.

Even the cheaper option is outrageously expensive – nearly $100 million tax dollars for a fashionable, politically correct response to the global warming theory.

The cost to city taxpayers of fitting a new housing development with a traditional natural gas heating grid is negligible by comparison. And what costs there are, are recovered very quickly through taxes from homeowners who benefit.

So asking everyone in town to ante up $98 million to pay for an experimental system to heat and cool Blatchford in an eco-friendly way (one in which the technology isn’t yet fully perfected) is nuts, especially since it could take up to 20 years for the city to recoup its investment — if ever.

But by standing this eco-zealous option up against an absolutely preposterous one in which the city would spend nearly $207 million to squeeze out an extra three percentage points of greenhouse gases, makes the cheaper one look a lot less crazy.

When outlining the $98-million option last Thursday, Mayor Don Iveson and Gary Klassen, the city’s general manager of sustainable development, both admitted the technology does not exist yet to make a central heating system in Blatchford completely carbon neutral.

What Iveson and Klassen want council to do is build a central heating and cooling system for Blatchford (buildings and homes aren’t heated by their own furnaces, but from a central hot-water system) and power that with a traditional gas turbine until such time as greener technologies that don’t yet exist are invented to replace the boiler.

That’s a lot of “ifs” and “maybes” to ask taxpayers to subsidize in the hope at some point in the future it will all work out.

In the process, the mayor and administration have demonstrated once again just how fixated they are on “green” things.

They can’t spare a few hundred thousand dollars to help developers build visitable townhouses. But they have nearly $100 million for unproven “green” technologies.