Skip to content

Culture department already being questioned

Now the new city will forge ahead with an as-yet announced budget for a bogus cultural plan to spend, spend and spend our tax money.

To the Editor,

Re: Cultural plan priority for department, Dec. 26.

How can the City of Nanaimo carve out a new Arts and Culture Department when school kids are starving, citizens are homeless and homeowners can hardly make ends meet?

You print that the arts sector in the city generates more than $150 million in economic activity and upwards of 1,300 jobs. That has already been proven bogus. The trumped-up fictitious study paid for by the city and its not-at-arms-length department was pretty well written in advance, void of independent facts.

The economic impact and jobs attributed to arts and culture was stretched to include movie theatres, spectator sports and event promoters, radio and television stations, video production, software publishers and this very newspaper. Maybe a local gas station was included, as an arts-type buys their gas there.

Now the new city department will forge ahead with an as-yet announced budget for a bogus cultural plan to spend, spend and spend our tax money.

And yes, all of us need to get ready to shell out more this year to cover our property taxes to help pay for the new Arts and Culture Department and all its trimmings.

It’s best all Nanaimoites cut back now on your living essentials of eating, heating and just getting by.

Kevan ShawNanaimo

 

To the Editor,

Re: Cultural plan priority for department, Dec. 26.

With yet another year ending, it is all too obvious that our elected officials have not bothered reading the writing on the wall about the dire consequences of continuing to go down the rocky path of economic mismanagement and reckless spending on these boondoggles of money pits.

Like this new case of a four-person cultural and heritage department all just because someone has said that it generates $150 million in economic activity with a bonus of 1,300 jobs that somehow magically appeared, without any real concrete proof. It is just a lot of the all too familiar political game to justify it.

Taxpayers are mad as hell at being taken for a one-way ride to bankruptcy in a Pinto.

Al MunroNanaimo