Civic Centre damage avoidable: reader

Editor: More often than not our office disagrees with administration and council to varying degrees on many pertinent matters involving the use of tax dollars. Our disagreement is founded on a great deal of work (fact finding as best we can). Our experiences with C-K describes that they are seldom, if ever, generous in disclosing taxpayer-owned information, even when legislatively compelled to do so.

C-K, like most or all levels of government, enshrines itself in secrecy, we suspect, given what we’ve uncovered, to avoid embarrassment to how they actually spend tax dollars.

We find C-K continually fails to provide financial transparency, especially with their annual budget information. The more information taxpayers have, the more the taxpayers can responsibly scrutinize their elected officials and administration.

Although the province has complete jurisdiction over municipalities, the province is giving municipal governments more power without matching transparency.

Now, the Civic Centre water damage is an occasion where we agree with administration. Administration advised council in 2016 and in 2020 of associated risks with the current building. Council offered no direction. Be mindful that council voted to spend $2M to determine if renovating the Sears building at a cost of $50M to $70M is a good investment.

Since the water damage is an emergency repair, the price tag could be higher due to overtime and a lack of competitive bidding. Administration provided two reports to council, one in 2017 and one in 2020 for municipal hall upgrading. Report No. 1 was $11.6M, which included the required investment in the Park Avenue Business Centre less the revenue received from the sale of the Economic Development building of about $750,000. This would have upgraded the Civic Centre to building code. Council rejected this. Administration Report No. 2 to bring the civic complex up to code, increase employee and public parking and access, locate council chambers to ground level (which I believe is imperative), allowing council chambers to be utilized as a multi-use gathering space available for meetings and community events. Additionally, this option not only would have improved municipal hall appearance and public traffic through the building but would have tripled the allowable building occupancy, which could support enhanced public service and efficiency. Further, this option would allow all current office staff at the Park Avenue Business Centre to transfer to a newly renovated Civic Centre, all the while freeing the PABC by offsetting expenses by renting or leasing the PABC.

A third option was given to council to build a new Civic Centre at an estimated cost of $51M.

Chatham-Kent administration recommended renovating the existing Civic Centre at a net cost of about $13M. No action supported by council was taken; instead council passed the downtown study for private investment and now we’re stuck with emergency repairs of our Civic Centre plus energy savings loss through the years with our old building. Loss of potential leasing income from the PABC, saving of the $2M donation to private enterprise, numerous smaller municipal income investments, coupled with the economic development building sale or other could have seen a beautiful bargain-priced, long-lasting Civic Centre materialize that we could have all lived with, minimizing costs to citizens with a building that would be citizen friendly I gotta give this one to administration.

John Cryderman Chatham