Nanaimo between Past and Future
The Estate of the late Friends of Plan Nanaimo is pleased to provide some history of our City’s megalomaniacal pursuit of mega scale projects for Nanaimo. The project around which this book is centred is the Vancouver Island Conference Centre (VICC) which saw over $3 million dollars escape to a developer which did not provide the “Marriott” hotel which was promised and last year saw about $5.5 million in taxpayer dollars going to pay the debt on the structure as well as filling the void in operating costs.
It appears that we may be setting out on another such ventures which already promise to removes tens of millions of dollars from Nanaimo taxpayers pockets over the next decade. It is said that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Read this book at your leisure. You may be particularly interested in the comments of Trevor Boddy, an internationally known Canadian architecture critic; Heywood Sanders, North America’s foremost expert on Convention Centres; Robert Bish former Co-Director of the Local Government Institute at the University of Victoria; and Robert de Leeuw on Risk Assessment.
Here is the book: BookMaster January 30th
Enjoy. We will look forward to your comments.
Posts and Comments on Nanaimo Governance 
A wonderful post.
Much too much to digest within the next few months.
A quick scan of the document reveals an insight that goes way beyond knee jerk opinion or comment.
A quick , all be it knee jerk, opinion!!.
The document refers to the problems with development & developers.
Much the same is going on within the Vancouver election & it’s issues.
Development & growth would seem to be at the core of many of our issues!