Yesterday's Council Meeting turned into a marathon with many Delegations speaking to a number of issues. Chief among these were the budget, and in particular the cut to gender specific guarding at the City jail cells. There were many speakers both male and female who supported the continuance of gender specific guards and who presented compelling reasons for this practice. It was noted that Nanaimo provides much needed leadership in this area. What was not made clear was why having some female guards add some $300,000 per year. Why does having a mixed set of guards increase costs so greatly. I hope to hear back on this.
Another major topic of interest was the BIA/DNPS which brought out a large number of speakers on both sides. In the end, both BIA bylaws were passed by Council with Councillor Sherry voting no on the particular BIA in which there was a majority against the matter but insufficient property value among that majority. All other Councillors supported both BIAs, thus providing $200,000 per year in taxpayers money to match the funds raised in the BIAs. There are to be some major changes in the management of the DNPS. We will probably hear more about this in the future. We hope what we hear will be good.
There was no concensus on the budget recommendations which staff presented. In fact the actions which Council took on the budget were quite different. Both items on which they did act deal with our city jail. They determined that the $750,000 which is to be spent in upgrading our jail under demands from the RCMP will be paid from reserves. This will reduce property taxes by about one percent. They also determined that gender specific guarding is to be maintained, rejecting the staff recommendation in this regard.
They could not agree last night on other staff recommendations or on additions from the list of 28 additional possible cuts that were contained in the budget. Futhermore Council questioned why some capital items seemed to go on into future years despite being funded in a previous year. There was no satisfactory answer to this question. The upshot of this discussion was to postpone further discussion and to send the report back to staff for further work.
To my way of thinking citizens should be giving both staff and council their opinions on the cuts which staff have proposed or others which the public might find better for the common wealth.
The Nanaimo Daily News reporter(s) and editor are to be thanked for their graphic portrayal of Campaign contributions and spending in our recent municipal election. Thursday's front page graph provides a picture of contributions and spending along with the accompanying list of major contributors provides a quick overview of a lot of data in a succinct and informative matter. The editorial then goes on to use this information to discuss the fact that this information comes about 120 days too late to be useful to the election itself. It remains, however, useful to the public in the future when contributors come before Council with requests and we can see who got what from whom and draw our own conclusions.
Thanks Again, Daily News.
For more detail and a look at how the money was spent go to the city's web site (and follow the bouncing buttons:
"Muncipal Hall;
Municipal Elections;
2008 Election;
View 2008 Campaign Financing Disclosure Documents;
OK (if you agree to the legalese); and then scroll down to the Candidate Names
All Financial Disclosure Statements for Nanaimo Candidates in the last Municipal election are now in and are posted on the City's web site. Take a look and see who got what from whom. Will it make a difference in who gets heard? in voting? Who will ever know?
Mondays FPCOW meeting has come and gone. Not on the agenda, but reported was a clarification of the status of a new agreement with Millennium/Suro about deal rights on the hotel development and access to the Maffeo-Sutton lands. It was revealed that, contrary to what seems to have previously been understood by many, including some Councillors, that the only deal existing at the moment is to develop a possible one year extension. If the previously outlined terms of reference are put into a final agreement, it will be brought forward to Council with a recommendation that the agreement with Millennium, as modified to allow for the possibility of other developers, be extended for another year.
Frankly I can't understand what this accomplishes. If we simply terminated the agreement for non performance as we have every right to do, we would have a call on some $3.2 million in fees paid to Millennium/Suro and have just as much, and perhaps more, access to alternative developers as we would have under this new agreement. What do taxpayers have to gain by this extension?
Council's direction to staff about the 2009 Budget and Property Tax Bylaw was laid over to the next Council meeting. This should allow a much broader audience to see their Council in action on the budget as Council meetings are televised. Don't miss it.
The matters of the BIAs (Business Improvement Areas) and the DNPS (Downtown Nanaimo Partnership Society) were the subject of three petitioners before Council who expressed concern about the operation of the DNPS and recommended that the ambiguous results of the Council Initiative (negative option) be set aside. One speaker also pointed out the possibility of perceived conflict of interest which was presented by the fact that three Councillors sit on the DNPS Board, thus both asking for and then voting for funding from the city and from taxpayers. Council, after some discussion, voted to procede with the BIA bylaws and they will procede to the next Council meeting. Given the results and the acrimony, it would perhaps have been wise for Council to follow staff's original recommendation in this matter which was for $175,000 from taxpayers and a straight up democratic vote on the matter.
The meeting also voted to award a contract for $2 million for a fixed price contract to install a heat pump system and a solar hot water heating system at the Conference Centre.
The report on Legislative Services which was to have been presented by Mr. Howat was laid over to the next FPCOW meeting in two weeks.
The FPCOW meeting at 4:30 on Monday in the City Hall Board room will be your opportunity to hear your Councillors talk about YOUR money. Don't miss it. These items are on the agenda:
(a) 2009 Budget and Property Tax Bvlaw- Staffs Recommendation: That Council provide direction regarding the 2009 Budget and Property Tax Bylaw.
(b) Business Improvement Area (BIA 1) Bylaw 2009 No. 7086
Business Improvement Area (BIA 2) Bylaw 2009 No. 7087
Staffs Recommendation: That Council:
I . receive the results of the "Local area service on council initiative - subject to petition against" process for BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT AREA (BIA I) BYLAW 2009 NO. 7086 and BUSINESS
IMPROVEMENT AREA (BIA 2) BYLA W 2009 NO. 7087 as included
in this report; AND:
2. provide Staff with direction with regard to the above noted bylaws.
(c) Verbal Report from Mr. I. Howat, Director of Legislative Services, regarding Legislative Services Operations.
PS: We still wait for Campaign Finance Disclosure Statements from some big names, eg Ruttan, Korpan, Brennan, McNabb and Kipp.
On Monday, March 16, at 4:30 in the City Hall Board Room, Council will sit as the Finance and Policy Committee of the Whole (FPCOW) to hold another in their series of discussions of the 2009 budget and the 2009-2013 Financial Plan, the document that sets the stage for taxes and for what will be happening -or not happening- in the next few years in our city. More attention should be paid. My hat is off to Mr. van Panhuis who spoke up at last Monday's Council Meeting on this subject. He is another of our retired citizens whose pension increase falls ever farther behind the property tax increases demanded by the city over the past number of years. There are many like him in our community.
Also, Monday is the last day for candidates -either losers or winners or Campaign Organizers- to file their Campaign finance disclosure documents without penalty. These should then be up on the city's web site on Tuesday for all to see. I believe we will find again that it is the same small number of folks who fork out big dollar donations to candidates and often subsequently appear before Council with proposals or contracts. It may well be time to go to one or more municipal parties to get some broader backing for and control over our Councillors. We all know that some candidates are running along provincial party lines and are really only playing in our sandbox for an opportunity to make it to the big leagues at the provincial level. I would like to hear opinions on the idea of a municipal party or parties in Nanaimo and what their goals might be.
I say this without prejudice to whether Cable Bay is good for Nanaimo or bad for us. What I do say is that, once again, we are dealing with a very large project which is going forward on talk. There has been no demonstrated examination of the consequences for Nanaimo taxpayers of moving on approval nor have we done a proper risk analysis. Instead we seem to be marching to the tune of a staff report which reads as though it were written by the developer proponent and which excludes any of the cons to go with any of its unsupported, and in some cases directly misleading pros of the report.
The Pied Piper visited St. Petersburg and Nanaimo back in 2004 and we got, at great public expense, a conference centre. We now know that the promises of our" partner" were written on the wind. Do we have another such situation where big promises have been made, but we have neither independent review of the project or any mechanism by which to require promises to be kept?
To be sure, Councillor McNabb pointed out that first and second readings which Council voted 3-5 to give tonight leads to a Public Hearing. What was not pointed out was that a Public Hearing has not been an effective mechanism for eliciting information, but rather a meeting through which Council is forced by legislation to sit, hearing but not necessarily responding to questions or comments put to them by citizens. And after the public hearing, case closed. Councillors are not to listen to anything more after the public hearing. Where is the forum where the public and their representatives meet to discuss issues?? Where is the forum in which our Councillors discuss issues among themselves -and if they have one, why n
My Name is Ron Bolin and I reside at 3165 King Richard Drive in Nanaimo.
Mayor Ruttan, Councillors, Citizens:
I come before you this evening to ask that before making any precipitate decision regarding the expansion of the Cable Bay project by giving first and second reading to OCP Bylaw Amendment Bylaw 2009 No. 6500.004, that answers to the following questions be provided to the public:
1. Why should the City of Nanaimo and its citizens consider this proposal when the applicant did not have sufficient belief in his own project to proceed with a referendum on a similar request for expansion at the last municipal election? Such a referendum would have cost an insignificant amount of money at that time and the developer would have had adequate opportunity to convince Nanaimo residents that this was a good deal for the public as well as for him. Why does the proponent always look to our Council rather than to our citizens? Because the developer owns adjacent land which would provide any needed extra space for its golf course but has thus far refused to either accept a split jurisdiction or to undertake the referendum process necessary to bring that land into the city, is it not incorrect for the staff report to assert that the subject area is needed for the project to be feasible?
2. As we have learned in the case of the Conference Centre, any large project can lead to unforeseen risks. In the case of the VICC the city did not undertake an independent risk assessment of the project and we are now left holding a rather large bag. The City and its taxpayers are potentially liable for servicing costs to this very large project. As it lies so far from the built up infrastructure of the city, these costs could be very great. An independent risk analysis of the city’s potential liabilities in this development should be undertaken before any further decisions/obligations are made or accepted. How much might services cost and how much might new taxes bring in, given pessimistic as well as optimistic assumptions? The new development of the last few years seems to have brought only higher taxes with it. Will Council undertake to see that a professional independent risk analysis of the project is performed before making any further decisions in this matter?
3. Have the recommendations regarding industrial land contained in the 2007 OCP study, City of Nanaimo Land Inventory & Residential Capacity Analysis, been carried out and if so, what are the results? That study notes that much of Nanaimo’s industrial land inventory is either already developed or “constrained by water feature setbacks and slopes” or “located in lands that are believed to be unavailable in the short-term”, or “have been acquired for future use”. In conclusion this report notes that the city has only about 100 ha of available land zoned I4 (heavy industrial) and about 47 ha of light industrial land. It goes on to note that: “Ensuring that the City’s industrial land base is maintained is important to the continued economic prosperity of Nanaimo, as well as the broader regional economy.” Is it not misleading to speak of a 2.8% reduction in our industrial land when we are actually looking at a decrease of over 20% in our available heavy industrial land inventory? This example is particularly significant as we are looking at heavy industrial land that is directly adjacent to existing industrial dock facilities which could greatly reduce transportation costs for any industry choosing to locate there. Why was this additional information not presented in the staff report?
4. The author of the City of Nanaimo Downtown Urban Design Plan and Guidelines noted during the presentation of his report to our last Council that there has never been a case where a downtown revitalization has succeeded when major development is being undertaken at a city’s periphery. Why is his warning not mentioned in the staff report?
Before we buy any more pigs in a poke, please ensure that adequate due diligence is performed.
We are back to Cable Bay again trying to grow their project without having to face the rigours of a referendum where all might have to be revealed. Back to a Council process which doesn't demand much disclosure and even before all the disclosure statements from the last election have been filed.
Citizens and taxpayers need to demand that the costs to the public of servicing a project like this on Nanaimo's periphery for water, sewer, police, fire garbage, snow removal, etc. will cost. While it may be true that such a project would bring increased property taxes, unless the pattern set for past years is somehow broken, those increased taxes are more than offset by increased servicing costs. Who among us have seen their property taxes decrease during the strong growth of the past few years. It is simple business. No matter how large the increase in income, If the increase in costs exceed that income, the business is not long for this world (or wouldn't be if governments did not have the power to pick pockets). We have watched it happen here. Are we to continue to stand idly by?
Let's put our heads around this when Councillors tell us that they have been approached by other possible developers:
1. We have been assured by Council that we have been dealing since 2004 with developers who have great skill and experience and knowledge of the hotel development game. If they can't find investors, then how does Council propose to find them?
2. Has Council considered that the approaches to them in this matter are a bit like that of vultures to dying animals just waiting for the moment when they can tuck in?
