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City councillor recants rant

Coun. Ranj Pillai apologized after lambasting a landscaping contractor for not completing its work. Adorna Landscaping had contracts to do the landscaping work on the new public safety building and Shipyards Park.

Coun. Ranj Pillai apologized after lambasting a landscaping contractor for not completing its work.

Adorna Landscaping had contracts to do the landscaping work on the new public safety building and Shipyards Park. The contracts were worth almost half a million dollars.

Because not all the work was completed, it was re-budgeted for this year.

Last week, Pillai called for penalties for contractors that don’t meet their obligations. But this week he backtracked.

“I want to apologies to the contractor on the fact that I made a statement but I am upset that I did not have the full story.”

While some of the delays were caused by unexpected labour shortages, some of the delays were caused by the city.

“In this particular case, we didn’t supply (top soil) on time and scope changed,” said Pillai. “I’ve gone over this over and over again about using a true process of project management.”

The problems were exasperated by the fact that the lead on the project changed several times, he said.

“On multiple occasions there was different people giving direction, so all of these things led to the situation we were in.”

This only came to light after Pillai got a call from the contractor, who explained the situation.

“They were open and did say that they were short on staff but I think that I owe that to them because I know that they are a reputable company,” he said.

“But at the same time, if we are re-budgeting we should be doing a complete post-mortem on why projects didn’t get done and figure out how we can fix those things.”

Contact Josh Kerr at

joshk@yukon-news.com