The wooden staircase in Tom Riley Park is a lot of things. It’s an example of laudable do-it-yourself community spirit. It’s a fun talking point about absurd government costs. It’s an essay written in wood about the frustrations of waiting on the city bureaucracy.

What it is not, really, is a suitable staircase for a public park.

You may have read or heard about this staircase by now: about how 73-year-old local resident Adi Astl asked the city to build a small staircase in the park because he was tired of watching children and seniors struggle up the short but steep grassy incline; about how the city’s response indicated it might study the matter but that building some stairs would cost between $65,000 and $150,000; about how Astl went and bought some lumber, recruited a homeless man as an assistant and built some stairs himself for a total of $550.

If you’ve heard all of that, you’ve likely also heard that city inspectors were not impressed with Astl’s handiwork — they roped them off closed with caution tape and signs indicating they are unsafe. The latest I saw from CBC reported the city was trying to find a way to work with Astl on the stairs.

But just looking at photos of those stairs published in broadcast media and posted by social media users, you can see clearly that the city inspectors are not wrong. The stairs themselves have no concrete foundation, the stringers and railing sit on mud or gravel. The stringers support the stairs only in the middle, not across their length. The handrail is unstable, and it is not anchored to the ground. A series of boxed steps partly filled with wood chips leading up to the stairs present an obvious tripping hazard. The platform at the top of the slope is narrower than the stairs, has no handrail at all and has a large gap in the middle of the two boards it is made of.

Read more: City takes down DIY park staircase to replace it with official one

I hope it isn’t too strong an insult to say that it looks like the kind of thing I might build. My wife never stops remarking on the “rustic” and “rough hewn” aesthetic of the shelf I built in our laundry room, for example. I’m not the Fancy Police here, out to critique someone’s work because the screws aren’t counter-sunk and the length of the rails doesn’t quite match up.

But let’s be real: this is not suitable for a city park. Infrastructure on city property has to be safe and stable. The city doesn’t want to booby trap citizens into breaking their necks, and we don’t want to pay to settle the lawsuits that come if they do. City infrastructure has to be accessible, too. There are good reasons for slope, step-height and handrail standards that allow the elderly, visually impaired and those with mobility impairments to safely use them. And the city shouldn’t build things that will fall apart in a season or two — we want city infrastructure to withstand all kinds of weather for years at a time.

There’s a reason, in other words, we don’t turn the city’s infrastructure procurement over to Etsy, allowing random retired people to take over all city jobs on the cheap — Grandma can knit a picnic shelter roof! Aunt Gerta can use her watercolours to paint the traffic lines on the road! Uncle Jose can get out the garden spade and start digging the relief subway line! It’s a charming idea, but it doesn’t work. The city needs to build things properly, professionally, safely.

Still, the story resonates.

Part of me wants to encourage exactly this kind of can-do DIY approach to city life where people don’t just complain about the things their community lacks, but roll up their sleeves and put in the work to provide them.

In this case, there was clearly a need, or at least a desire. City spokespeople, including the mayor, have pointed out there’s an accessible paved path from the parking lot only a couple of hundred steps away. They don’t mention that the path is fenced off and closed at the moment because of a construction project. And even if it weren’t, the “before” pictures some broadcast networks showed of the slope in question show a muddy path well-worn through the grass by the stream of travellers climbing it. Someone had even affixed a rope to a post at the top for people to use to hoist themselves up. Approved path or not, the park users obviously wanted a usable route here.

And it seemed the city’s estimate for what it would take to provide one is ridiculous. If $550 is clearly not enough to do the job right, the city’s estimate of $65,000 to $150,000 seems to overshoot the mark by an order of magnitude in the other direction.

Other media outlets obtained quotes from contractors for a properly installed concrete staircase there with metal railings and came up with numbers in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. Many of us might support a generously paid public service and understand that government accountability measures mean a premium might be applied: maybe 10 or 15 or even 25 per cent higher than the private sector. But 10 to 20 times higher? No.

It’s the kind of outrageous-on-its-face example of government spending estimates that the late Rob Ford built his career on pointing out. When we hear the Scarborough subway extension will cost $3.35 billion or more, we may be certain that sounds like too much, but the numbers are so high and the project so big that we have no way to get our heads around it.

A concrete staircase, however, many of us know at least a bit about — many of us have replaced our own, at home, for less than a few thousand dollars. To hear the city looking at possibly $150,000 for a similar and only barely larger job is galling. If this is the kind of cost inflation the city faces for a small job, many ask themselves, what kind of money is being thrown around on the big ones?

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It’s worth talking about. Astl’s carpentry project may not stand up as a piece of infrastructure or an example of how to solve the city’s problems. But as a way of calling attention to some of those problems, it may be eight steps in the right direction.

Correction – July 21, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to the stair’s stringers as risers.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire