To the Editor,
Just when you think the bureaucracy at the City of Nanaimo may have exhausted their efforts to try to explain their wasteful spending decisions, they have instead found a new word in their vocabulary.
They are now defining spending as an “offset”, but a more appropriate term is “sinkhole”.
Instead of acknowledging that the city is increasing staff every year at an unsustainable rate, and thereby escalating taxes much more than inflation, they formed a new “corporation” and transferred employees to this not-at-arm’s-length entity which will never, now or in the future, realize a penny of revenue.
And who pays for this financial waste? The taxpayer of course, in the amount of almost $1.5 million in 2012 and increasing each and every year.
This includes every penny of salaries, benefits, expenses and everything else for the employees.
This new city folly is called the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation and was established to promote economic activity in the city.
It would be interesting to know how many successful businesses this group has individually established and how many jobs it has created in the past.
It will create some activity, such as printing up a lot of brochures showing pictures of the waterfront and the like for placement on the ferries. And most assuredly they will write lots of memos to each other and their masters at city hall.
What a complete waste of limited resources during this period of fiscal restraint taking place everywhere except in Nanaimo.
Wayne Schulstad
Nanaimo