THE 60% SOLUTION, CITY HALL STYLE
While yet another high profile City Hall manager tied closely to the Olympic Village bites the dust, two crucial questions remain unanswered.
Hell, they remain, except for these pages, unasked.
1. Play the Blame Game all you want. Six of the 10 current City Councillors were there at all the in-camera meetings that created this mess. Anton, Cadman, Chow, Louie, Deal and Stevenson have yet to tell us very much about how it all began and how they voted.
Today, the Vancouver Sun delves into this issue in a nice piece by Jeff Lee, in which we see Raymond Louie playing a little fast and loose with the history books - not to mention the accounting books.
2. When the extraordinary meeting of the Provincial Legislature convenes this weekend to draft a Ready-Mix Law allowing the Vancouver Charter to borrow at will, does this signal the beginning of the new era of regular deficit financing?
They all claim this is a "one-time" affair, but that's what governments throughout history have always claimed about new taxes and levies.
This little "crisis" will go down as an elaborate excuse to change city hall financing and permanently diminish the city's credit rating.
Finally, Wall Financial is delaying or perhaps suspending its own construction plans for a four tower project across the street from the Village.
Wasn't Wall the other bidder for the Village in the first place, and a bidder with a much more solid and accomplished track record than the stumbling Millenium?
Didn't City Hall choose Millenium because it offered $20 Million more than Wall?
If Bruno Wall is saying this may not be the most prudent time to build, we, the taxpayers, should be good and truly scared.
5 comments:
I see the parks board wants the Vancouver Charter to be 'tinkered' with so they can have billboards all through our parks during the Olympics.
Welcome to Coney Island.
We have the beginnings of an Olympic sized scandal. It seems Campbell % Co. and his chums in the NPA have played fast and lose with the facts and now the s*** is hitting the fan.
Stay tuned - FastFerries are being replaced with Olympics!
It is not only the 'permission to borrow' aspect that troubles me. It is the Robertson-proposed, Campbell-only-too-happy-to-oblige, skirting of the referendum process that is the most dangerous.
The former Local Government Act required a municipality to hold a referendum of the people, if it intended to commit its taxpayers to a financial liability which exceeded a certain dollar amount (which varied according to a formula set out in the Act), or which went beyond a period of five years. That requirement was repeated in the Vancouver Charter.
When Campbell and Co. ascended to the throne in 2001, one of the first things they did was bring in the Lidstone lawyers to amend the Act into what is now the Community Charter.
One of the most significant changes in the wording of the Act, morphed the referendum requirement into the almost impossible to achieve, counter-petition process. A C-P is tantamount to negative billing, and requires a petitioner to gather the names of people who were entitled to vote in the previous election. Who can do that in a hot real estate market? Although referenda can still be held, what local council will use it, if people are likely to vote down a council initiative?
In summary then -- while borrowing $450-875 million will be tough on voters in the City of Vancouver, an anti-democratic precedent will be set for every citizen in BC.
Campbell and Co. are sure selective about the precedents they set, are they not?
Elizabeth James
VERY fishy new revelation about Louie and him trying to "trick the NPA" with his motion. Why in the world would he do that, unless this was part of a grand plan to pin all of this on NPA councillors all along? Who thought it would be a good idea to screw around with the Olympics project to score political points? That's like playing around inside a nuclear reactor!
Me thinks these Happy Planet Vision people are a lot more sinister than they appear to be. They are very carefully controlling the information given or leaked to the press because they are not being completely honest or forthright.
There's something I really don't like about Mr. Louie.
I still say he leaked the memo that started this whole debacle...and one day down the road I think I will be proved right on this.
He's kind of like that guy in your university lecture who asks questions he already knows the answers to, just to make himself look more smarter.
Post a Comment