City may pay twice to fix windmill in Golden Gate Park
Two hundred thousand dollars may be enough money to make your head spin, but apparently it isn’t enough to make 
the blades of Golden Gate Park’s Murphy Windmill turn ’round.
According to the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Recreation and Park department this week will consider paying a Dutch contractor for work on the blades, even though the City already paid $200,000 to another contractor for the same job.
The subcontractor in the Netherlands had completed his portion of the work on the windmill’s cap, but he said he was never paid the $200,000 or so that [the main contractor] owed him for the work.
Meanwhile, [the subcontractor] also has the sail stocks and frames for the windmill blades and is “ready, able and willing to complete the windmill restoration work, but will not do so unless and until it receives payments” for the work already completed.
The main windmill contractor went under in 2009, the Examiner reports.
The cap of the 1905 Murphy Windmill had been shipped to the Netherlands in 2002 for special restoration work. Work on the Murphy Windmill could be completed in 2011.
Golden Gate Park’s other windmill, near the Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden and known as the Dutch Windmill, was restored in the 1980s.
Read the rest of the story at the San Francisco Examiner.
Photo by Flickr user Peter576.
