Feb. 27 Council Meeting
By Ron Bolin: Feb 24, 2012
The following items of general interest are on Monday’s Agenda:
- A presentation on the Bowen Road/ Quarterway Bridge Improvement project;
- A delegation on the newly minted Communication Officer position;
- Advisory Committee on Environmental Sustainability’s 2012 Work Plan;
- Grant’s Advisory Committees recommendation to provide $1,397.42 for an annual volunteer luncheon (I would not include this, but I wonder how many other volunteer luncheons might be forthcoming);
- 2012-2016 Financial Plan Bylaw Amendment;
- A report on the cost of acquiring the West Linley Valley land for a park;
- Staff’s recommendation that, for accessibility reasons, all FPCOW meetings be moved to the Shaw Auditorium until the new Annex Building is completed;
- Staff’s recommendation that, for reasons of accessibility, all Advisory Committees, etc. currently meeting in the City Hall Board Room be moved to new and accessible locations;
- That Zoning Bylaw 2011 No. 4500.004 to amend the height restrictions within the Single Dwelling Residential (R1/R1a) zones be abandoned;
- That Council rescind third reading of Financial Plan Bylaw 20112 No. 7144;
- That Council pass third reading of the Financial Plan Bylaw as amended.
The meetin will be held in the Shww Auditorium at the Conference Centre at 7pm.
The full agenda can be found at:
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As an aside, I note that as of this evening (Feb. 24, 2012), Campaign Finance Documents from Mayor Ruttan and Councillors Brennan, Kipp and McKay have not appeared on the City web site. See:
Legislation gives them until March 19 to report, but as they are currently voting on budgets, contracts, rezonings and developments, this information should be available now. It is hard to understand how the banks with all their complicated transactions, can provide tax information within 60 days while it appears difficult for our elected officials to produce theirs in the 90+ days since the election. It likewise remains to be seen whether other Campaign Organizers will submit documents.
Posts and Comments on Nanaimo Governance 
Volunteer Nanaimo holds an annual luncheon and most organizations will hold appreciation events for their volunteers.
Interesting and blunt letter, re Communication Officer, from Gary Korpan http://www2.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/letters/story.html?id=3817b67c-ef3b-4275-9b04-ae14dea4c7f5 . He is also one of those that have not submitted campaign disclosures. Am curious to see how much he billed for storage of signs this time around.
Also on the subject of Communication Officer, I had an e-mail from Darrell Bellart asking if I would like to comment. When he called me the first thing he said was that criticizing the reporter was not the way to get a point across. Worked though as he did call me:)
I see in the report that they say the $140,000.00 for this position covers “all costs to the related position.” Seems to me that is not what was said at the FPCOW meeting.
Moving the FPCOW meetings to the SHAW Auditorium would be great if they actually intended to televise and post the meetings for the public. This would be at least a level of openness and transparency. Far better usage of funds than a communication officer. An even better usage would be to record and put on the website all committee meetings.
“At the 2011-AUG-08 “In Camera” meeting of Council, staff presented a report regarding park acquisition priorities that was based on a growing community interest in the acquisition of park property in the west Linley Valley area. ” First question; why was this done in camera? Seems to me the 5 – 6 million dollar cost would provide benefits to the community far in excess of the cost.
Re the priorities of the 2005 Parks, Recreation & Culture Master Plan; :
“Focus of the following features in future acquisition of lands for public open space in order of priority:
• waterfront and shoreline areas
• lakes, streams and river courses
• woodlands with extensive natural areas and consolidate future acquisitions and
dedications to achieve areas larger than totlots” Seems to me they fit right in with the potential purchase of the Linley Valley lands.
“That Zoning Bylaw 2011 No. 4500.004 to amend the height restrictions within the Single Dwelling Residential (R1/R1a) zones be abandoned.” Not getting this from the report. Seems to me the amendment is actually going for third reading.
At the 2011-AUG-08 “In Camera” meeting of Council, staff presented a report regarding park acquisition priorities that was based on a growing community interest in the acquisition of park property in the west Linley Valley area. ” First question; why was this done in camera? Seems to me the 5 – 6 million dollar cost would provide benefits to the community far in excess of the cost.
Perhaps the City should consider purchasing the Cable Bay property?
The taxes have not yet been payed plus the project is severely flawed.
What access do you have to in-camera meetings? Is the report in tomorrow’s (Monday, Feb.27) Council meeting the same one that was presented earlier.
I would agree that putting such a hypothetical matter into an in-camera session is stretching the in-camera legislation to the extreme.
Will the public get to vote whether or not they want this $70M dam? I believe the residents of Abbotsford got to vote on a similar topic for their water issues.
Thanks for this blog, it is so difficult to get real news.
Re: moving FPCOW to Shaw…it is up to Shaw to televise, given the usual content of an FPCOW it is likely of little interest….
What will the move to Shaw cost the city?? We do pay the VICC for the use of the auditorium you know.
The cost of moving the FPCOW to the Conference Centre is shown in the report to be approximately $19,500. What was not shown was the amount we will get back as our portion of the Centre’s income, i.e. our rent. It is thus impossible to assess the financial situation of this move compared to the alternatives.
Perhaps we the people should sell the rights to widen Bowen Road through Bowen Park for 5-6 million so that we can acquire Park land in Linley Valley. Just saying…………..
Ron: “Get back as our portion of the Centre’s income” ….????????? What contract have you been reading???
Jim: As I understand it we lease the operation of the Conference Centre to a private corporation and thus collect lease payments from them. The lease payments do not cover our costs and, I believe, we are also obligated to make sure that they do not lost money on operations. We sold the commercial space for considerably less than it cost to build and this is a policy which we seem to have followed in our leased space as well. Whether we are losing more money on the lease than we might lose if we sold the rest of the space remains a question.
At any rate, we do get money back from the operators, even though it is insufficient. That is what I have talked about.
If you have a different reading, please explain.
It was revealed this evening that we get back about 75% of the money we pay for the use of the Conference Centre which we built and for which we are paying, i.e. we are taking a 25% haircut.
Ron; ask Mr. Kenning to explain that 75% they are claiming comes back…… if you agree with his logic….well….’nuff said…
Jim: It would not be gentlemanly to steal your question. Let us know what you find out.
Ron; here’s the logic in a nutshell, as I understand it…… we have to subsidize the VICC by about $1 million per year, depending on their income, now, because we pay them in the form of RENT, we are reducing our subsidy……understand now????
In other words, because we are paying the VICC operators rent, it reduces the amount we would pay them in a subsidy.
Only Mr. Howat and Mr. Kenning would think that is a good deal.
Sorry Jim, I don’t get it. Just what is it that we are renting from them? The agreements can be seen at:
Click to access FPCOW070219A.pdf
and the amendment at:
Click to access C090323A.pdf
If you need to find the location of the agreements in these minutes, simply use the pdf search facility (the binoculars) and type in the word “atlific”.
Who wrote up the contract and who approved it?
Ron, every time the city of nanaimo uses a space in the conference centre, the city pays rent to the operators of the center. That is the way it has ALWAYS been. Nothing new there.
Since the city guarantees the operator a certain level of earnings, the city subsidizes the operator…..currently at about $1 million a year.
I have a copy of the agreement, and have had this conversation with staff in recent years.
The original agreement bears Mr. Howats name. How the convention centre contract is actually constructed has been a well kept secret.
A good project for the new communications director.
Gord…. this is not a new contract, it was written about five years ago and has been available to anyone who cared to read it…that pretty much eliminates 99.999% of Nanaimo
Let me explain the confusion.Using the facility by the bureaucracy is not an expense,but rather an “offset”,in the same way that transferring 6 City employees to the Economic Development “Corporation” represents a “decrease” in the number of City employees,even though the Nanaimo taxpayer pays for 100% of 100% of the costs.Pretty simple,right?Just have to remember that an expense is not an expense, it’s an offset.
Here’s the way it was explained to me by city staff… their explanation is not this clear…
the city pays VICC to use the facility, so that it shows on the VICC books as income, the same as it would from anyone. The more income, the VICC ‘earns’ the less the $1 million subsidy the city has to give the VICC operator at year end….. get it now???
No one at city hall can support the statement, that paying VICC $20,000 in rental will reduce the amount of city subsidy by 75%, frankly, I think that was just a made up number.
City hall mathematics.The more money the taxpayer subsidizes the VICC,the more money we get back.We should be giving them $10 million a year and with all the money we get back the annual tax increases would be 0%.Right,Ron?
Wayne: The answer might be yes. It all depends on whether we need the space. If it is cheaper to rent the existing space than to build new space, then the deal might be OK. If for example, we were to use space available in the VICC instead of building a new City Hall Annex at a cost of around $12 million (not to mention all the space that will be needed to replace other earthquake susceptible city buildings) then maybe we could make it pay -or at least mitigate our losses.
Unfortunately the VICC was built by the City. We then had the opportunity to have some of our bureaucrats operate it, or lease its operation to professional conference centre operators. As professionals, they are not going to run this albatross at a loss just to make us happy. They do pay us lease rates. And these rates apparently cover about 75% of the cost of operations. (The extent to which an inordinate amount of the total VICC operating expenses are packed into the fee we pay for use of the Auditorium is unknown.) So if we pay them $20,000 to use the space that we leased to them for $15,000 our net cost is $5,000. The extent to which this constitutes profit to them is anybodies guess, and probably involves taxation as much as any particular business practices.
In any event, If we really needed all the space in the VICC and didn’t need professional conference centre operators to run it, we could repatriate the space and act as both owners and operators. The extent to which we might save on this deal depends on, for the functions to be performed in the building, whether our managers are better, i.e. more cost effective, than “their” managers.
The problem is that it is there. Now what do we do with it?
Ron;
We are not leasing the operators the VICC… we are guaranteeing them a profit regardless of the amount of space that they rent…..at the end of the year if the VICC has not earned enough ‘profit’ we will get NOTHING back and it will have cost $20,000…. that 75% was just so much smoke and mirrors………
An example of how this works…… the VICC could actually triple the number of delegate days they book and it would PERHAPS mean we only have to subsidize $850,000 instead of $1,000,000…. council and staff are pretty slippery with the facts of how this deal works, in fact I’m not convinced they actually KNOW how it works.
On the need for moving to a wheelchair accessible space, we do have a device at city hall which is supposed to make getting to the second floor possible…..but not to worry city hall is looking for $50,000 to put towards a $150,000 elevator……
Jim: If we are actually guaranteeing a profit without any shared risk this would be of great public interest. Perhaps you can provide the contract clauses which spell out this situation. I am prepared to eat humble pie if we our Council is so far gone into their fantasy that no business principles apply. And I suspect the public would be greatly benefited by this understanding as well/
Ron:
Sit down with Mr. Howat and have him or Brian explain it to you. Or read the contract. The operators have such a sweet deal, they renewed at the drop of a hat.
Expect some evasive double talk,,,,,, but just persist.
As for the public being interested……that I seriously doubt. Since even the opponents of this centre don’t seem to know how it has been operating this past 5 years.
Jim: Since you seem to be on top of this please just give us the Chapter and Verse from the contract so we don’t have to repeat the research you seem to have done. I don’t believe that anything that I would get from Mr. Howat would supersede the contract.
Ron:
I would be more interested in hearing the Chapter and Verse you are basing your opinion on??
Jim: In ordinary discourse it is the one who disputes an argument who is required to provide the evidence for their dispute. By your present reasoning there is no argument, only rhetoric. We have enough of this in Nanaimo already.
That notwithstanding, this whole discussion is a distraction since the problem is with the facility and what to do with it now that we have it. It costs money even if it is not used at all. Would you like the City to take over the management directly? Would you like to find a lessee who would be willing to take a financial bath “for the gipper”? (And if you find one, let me know. I have a bridge I would like to sell them.)
Ron: I don’t agree with your premise …….. are you saying that presenting an argument, such as you have with no supporting evidence makes it necessary for me to do all your homework? I have pointed you to the source of my conclusion….. if you are too busy to investigate…….. ’nuff said.
What would I like to see done…….close the doors, turn out the lights and sell it to the highest bidder……case closed!!!