With the money spent on the gazebo we could have a cable car with glider racks going up the face Maybe a zip line going down for the bad days.
Well, the cable car might be a little out of the budget, but I bet we probably could do the zip line for that much IF not for the regulations and government "controls".
I think that is a big part of why the early estimates were so far off. We probably could have built the gazebo for $40 grand, if we told nobody we were doing it, and simply made it adequate and safe to reasonable standards for people willing to jump off of mountains tied to engineered nylon underwear. The estimates were likely thinking in that realm and expecting much of the labor to be free from the members.
Of course, we couldn't do it without telling anyone and once we told one entity the requirements and costs snowballed as each government requirement led to another. This also led to us discovering we could not do it ourselves, because the requirements made that impossible.
Just my view from outside the process.
"We're from the government, and we're here to help."
