re: Border wall to include tourist attractions and viewing decks for tourists

"Designs must be able to repel pickaxes and sledgehammers for at least an hour and be aesthetically pleasing from the north side."


WOW.....who ever is writing these spec's is a fricking genius. Aesthetically pleasing??? There is no way to quantify that.....so what happens is the contractor designs a drab arse example of a wall and the CO and design authority take them to task over it not being aesthetically pleasing....and the contractor asks for a quantifiable measure, which does not exist, and so they start initiating change order after change order after change order....and the company that the CO and the design authority wanted in the first place is chosen no matter how low their bid because their design is the only one that meets this unmeasurable requirement...so the other offerrors challenge the results, everybody lawyers up and in about 6 years they decide to recompete it...meanwhile the company that the design authority and the CO wanted all along has been working on and being paid for the design they originally submitted and at the end of the day the $20 billion project is costing $220 million and the tax payers wonder why???


And why a pick axe and sledge hammer for an hour? BAHAHAHAHAHAHA....that tells anyone all they need to know about where the fricking thing is going to be built...The majority of the length of this wall is going to be an hour away from any sort of authority who could respond to 59 minutes of someone wailing the hell out of a piece of government property FROM A FOREIGN NATION with a sledge hammer or a pick axe.....but no mention of a fricking skid steer with a jack hammer attachment....


Whoever added the pick axe /sledge hammer language did so as a fricking joke....BLEEVE me!!!

This is how government spending gets out of control. You don't see shite like "aesthetically pleasing" being used as a performance metric in the private sector....and savvy estimators see shite like that and start salivating at the idea of the change orders that will be forthcoming....