To the Editor,
Re: City answers questions about $15.7-million annex, www.nanaimobulletin.com, May 13.
In what is supposed to explain why city council and staff are choosing to spend 2.5 times what is necessary to provide a safe working place for city staff, their answers seem unconvincing and in some cases defy logic.
Council needs to answer the following questions to support this decision to spend a huge amount of taxpayer’s dollars at a time when taxes are ever increasing with no end in sight.
1. How did our planning and building inspection department, with its staff of highly trained building engineers, miss all these deficiencies? The release offers an explanation which basically says the city engineers missed it before the purchase, and hired ones found the problems after the fact.
2. The explanation for the decision being ‘in camera’ does not explain the reason for the secrecy surrounding making public which members of council voted for the decision to spend nearly $16 million when less than $7 million would provide a safe building. The public absolutely needs to know which councillors voted for this decision and there is no reason to keep this information in camera.
3. Why burden the taxpayer with another 1.1 per cent tax increase to borrow $4 million when the city has ample reserves accumulated from previous overtaxation? This demonstrates a complete lack of concern as to how many tax increases the public can afford. We need to know who supported this idea.
4. Now that the decision has been made, the public needs to be able to examine the contract with the design/builder to see how ‘tight’ this contract actually is, and how it would stand up when compared to a public tender for a building with the same specs.
5. Since the city has now declared publicly in the press that the current city annex is an unsafe building, they are not explaining why there is no need to immediately close it, in the interest of safety for both staff and the public. To leave it open seems a negligent decision now that the severity of the danger is known, based on a report completed in 2008.
Fear of litigation has always been a driving force behind decisions made by this council. It was that fear that overturned the Boston Pizza sign decision, if you will remember.
Clearly, the city is playing fast and loose with our liability, now that they have declared this building unsafe – something they have known since 2008 and will not have addressed for more than four years.
In closing I might suggest the reason they did not wish to take this matter to the public is that they were afraid the people actually paying the bills would have chosen to spend $6.5 million instead of nearly $16 million.
Jim Taylor
Nanaimo