Keep up the good work Ben!

Right on Ben

“Do we think that the taxpayers have an ever ending supply of money that can be doled out at will?”

We don’t think so. But there are a lot of bureaucrats and politicos out there – in charge – who definitely do!

Good work Ben! Thank you!

Irri…. I can appreciate that those costs could be higher than suggested in Ben’s story. For the sake of argument, let’s double it to $2 Mill. for renos to suite seniors with disabilities. That’s still $2 Mill. cheaper than what’s being proposed.

There is something stinky in the air and it’s not the usual industrial suspect.

So spend $2M on renos and the savings are still in the range of $3-4 M. Any project with the handicap label has an inflated price tag on it.

Any project where govt is involved has an inflated price tag on it.

“so let’s throw $1,000,000.00 dollars at the renovations.”

Ben, that will not likely even touch the replacement of the elevators to modern, higher speed cabs.
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The purchase of 17 high end homes is not exactly a fair comparison either. Those are market homes which will eventually be bought by the general population of PG, albeit that has been going at a slow pace over the last couple of decades and is slowing down even more.

You are comparing market housing to subsidized housing. The values have to be compared on more than a dollar for dollar basis.
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Now, do not get me wrong. I am not saying that we are getting good value for money. For one, I cannot tell because we have not yet been given full disclosure on the actual deal over the 60 year period.

1. What is the cost to the City and what are the benefits – both financial and social?

2. The same for the province.

3. The same for the Feds.

4. What are the costs and the benefits to the various people who will, over time, be living in that building?

5. Finally, and here is the real comparison in my view, how would all the above compare to a building located elsewhere in the CBD, on the periphery of the CBD such as the Winnipeg-Vancouver corridor or even just west of the Crescents?

Once one goes through that kind of analysis one would have a value for money comaparison of comparable options based on two or three different locations.

After all, that is the real purpose of this, isn’t it – is it rational to buy air rights in the CBD versus a couple of other location options.

Sit down in a West End Vancouver hotel tower from say the 30+ floor and take a look around. One quickly understands the level of both local and visiting residents it takes to generate the activities of a Robson, Denman, Davie street level retail and entertainment district.

Throw in a 20 seater community bus system which runs through the area ever 10 minutes and one or two other bus routes thrown in and one can see why people who like large cities live here.
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BTW, I still fail to understand why we have these huge buses operating in the City. These 20 seaters are great and all that PG needs at this time. The core review should look at how much the City and the province could save by selling the buses to a community that can support that size and obtain some of the smaller sizes. These buses all come outfitted with lift platform for the those in wheelchairs.

Who is accountable for this and other inflated government construction projects be it political or bureaucratic? Is there a contingency fund hidden away, that we know nothing about to cover cost overruns?

Irri … you are absolutely right about the costs to upgrade a building like that.

I suggest we start by a total teardown of the bathrooms and kitchens in each unit. That is what is normally done unless one wants to keep on being on the edge of a slum landlord.

Elevators also typically need to be upgraded. As well, the building heating system and often the plumbing as well.

Finally, the windows have likely not been replaced since the building was built some 40+ years ago. Time to do those as well.

By the time one is done with those items, plus flooring, doors, painting, etc. One can save some money over building a new building, but the final cost is likely to be in the order of 50% to 75% of a new building cost.

The simple thing? Ask a builder what she can do for an apartment in that condition for $1,000,000.

In the interest of comparing like things to like things.

The Spruce King house is sitting on property that would typcially be valued in the $100,000 range in a standard city subdivision.

Thus, the furnished cost is $182 for new construction.

Take away around $20,000 for furnishing the house with middle of the road furnishings and we get roughly $165 to $170 per square foot construction cost.

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The apartment building has corridors, service spaces, amenity spaces, straiwells, elevators, etc. So, if the units are 800 sf on average, then there neeeds to be a gross-up factor for the building based on the net square footage of the living units themselves.

I believe a reasonable gross-up factor for the type of building this likely is, it should be in the 30% range.

So, multiply your construction cost by 1.3 to get the full construction cost.

It’s in the ballpark of $4+ million, as stated.

BTW, Irri, your point about losing residential space fro existing renters is well taken!!!

Gus and Irri… I can see that math wasn’t your hot subject. Spending some time, talk to a contractor, the Spruce Kings home has 3 bedrooms, that’s 51 units, against 36, on a golf course, a garage thrown in, oh did you forget, big screen TV , landscaped, deck ,on 93,500 sq ft of land and you come with a figure of $248 a sq ft.. Compared to a four or five storey building with no green space, no garage, (oh Forgot, the city is throwing in a few of these at the expense of those who paid for the parkade) common walls. Yes, it will have an elevator. Let’s hope that both of you don’t get into power or become a contractor, well that is unless you have lots of money, or someone left you lot’s. Should the new digs be better than the ones that the average taxpayer is paying for. Hardly not with my money . Gus you have been living in the Performing Arts centre land to long, there is no free money.

Keep it up Meisner without you it never gets said

Thanks so much, Ben. I know you’ve come under a lot of flack for doing your job, but you do it well.

Part of a health democracy is a strong media. Without the media to keep everyone informed, things get dirty–very fast.

Without Opinion250, who would keep people honest?

Who is going to maintain these 17 homes? Mow the lawn, snow removal? Parking?

I get the idea of comparing what could we get for the money spent on this project.

Hopefully we will see a return from this “investment”.

Will we see a return from the District Energy Project?

What about Bondary Road? Or even Willowcale Road in the BCR – nicely paved, overpass over some creeks – but where does it go? And how much did that cost the City? Why did we need it?

There is no return on the district heating system. It costs $12.50 per GJ to heat with the district heating system.

It costs $7.50 per GJ to heat with natural gas.

Oh, did we mention that the district heating system still need to heat with natural gas when the wood heating system needs servicing? You don’t even get away from the capital costs of maintaining boilers…

The only people that can make the district heating system numbers work are those that live in never never land…

Taxpayers Money is endless is has to be spend any old way you can even if it makes no sense !
that’s my take on anything the Government builds

“Now would you wonder why I have asked for a Freedom of information request, after learning that we were spending more than $6 million dollars, of taxpayer money on a project that could easily have been done for less than three”

So Ben, where do you presume that the extra 3 million is actually going? Do you think someone is putting it in their back pocket, do you think that the price of materials is double what a local builder would pay or do you think it is actually possible that building an apartment complex like this is just plain more expensive than building a house and as such, that it can’t be compared to that type of endeavour?

I hope that when you do get the info from the FOI request that you publish the details so people can see how the amounts add up to the 6M. My guess is that there will be a whole bunch of boring stuff that seems to make sense once you break it down and look at it.

NMG, the price is out of line. Higher density is cheaper to build than lower density. The fact is that an exterior wall costs more to build than an interior wall. Higher density units have a lot fewer exterior walls.

The existing apartments in Prince George get appraised on a regular basis for insurance purposes. The insurance company wants to know how much it would cost if there was a fire and they had to rebuild–rebuild to current codes and brand new. There is considerable incentive on the insurance company to be conservative on this because they don’t want to be left on the hook if they are short.

The cost of this 36 unit apartment on a per unit basis is double what most apartments are appraised at for replacement. This 36 unit apartment didn’t have to provide landscaping, services like water and sewer were already on site and it didn’t have to provide a large parking lot.

You want to know were the extra couple of million went? So do we!

Yeah, who really knows. I guess we’ll know more once the details come out.

The problem is that we may never get the information with an FOI.

From what I understand the following happened (Irri can correct me if I’ve got something wrong):

BC Housing was told by the City that they were to deal with Commonwealth.

Commonwealth was told to put the construction out to tender. To keep it fair they had L&M Engineering do the tender. No one needed to know that the head of L&M Engineering is also a director in Commonwealth Health.

Commonwealth had Hayer Home bid, but Hayer Homes didn’t want to touch the project with a ten foot pole. They knew that WIC had had trouble getting paid for Commonwealth Health, but they didn’t want to offend anyone. Do you think they bid high or low?

WIC was also asked to bid. Remember the trouble they had getting paid? I wonder if they wanted another collections nightmare on their hands. Do you think they bid high or low?

The last bid was Commonwealth Health. Of the course L&M kept things fair so there was no way for Commonwealth to know the other two bids ;-). You guessed it, Commonwealth Health won the construction bid.

Except that you don’t see anyone from Commonwealth on the job site. They flipped it right away to another general contractor and kept the difference.

I may not have all the details right, but if this is what happened, then how would you ever find out with an FOI?

Icicle. How did you arrive at the figure of $12.50 per GJ to heat with the Community Energy System?? I know that the benefits we are supposed to receive from having less particulates in the air is flawed, however Im not familiar with the actual cost of providing heat on this project. Tks.

Tell you what to all those who think that it should be able to be built more cheaply …. go into the building contracting business and give the builders in PG a run for their money.

You should all be able to make a killing.

;-)

Midnight worker.

So where did you get the info about the Spruce King house lot being 93,500 sf feet of land?

The lot at 2656 Links Drive is approximately 114 feet deep with about a 56 foot frontage width and 77 foot rear lot line length. Since you are so good at math, you will already know that the approximate area of the property is 7,600 square feet. The actual Parcel information says the lot is 716.553449 m2 in area.

That is a far cry from 93,500 which would make the lot more than 2 acres in size.

The assessed value of the property is $85,300.

The cost of building a house has nothing to do with the cost of the land. The cost of selling the house with the parcel of land does.

So tell me, where did you learn your layman’s misunderstanding of the construction industry?

I think your research skills also leave a lot to be desired.

BTW, I am just giving you back some of your own medicine. You said our math skills leave something to be desired. And you are the best one to be the judge of that, eh? … LOL

Is it really a community energy system? One would think that term would mean biomass would be consumed to produce heat. What we really have is a stack gas economiser on Lakeland’s wood fired thermal oil heating system. Given the efficiency of the overall oil system the heat recoverable probably ranges in the 4 – 5 million btu/hr range providing the system is firing at full fire which is not necessarily the case as it is used to heat dry kilns which have varying heat loads.
A large natural gas fired complex is being built to supplement the heat from lakeland.
Given the distance the piping runs in the ground the heat loss is probably 15 – 20%.
Add in the power required to move the liquid through the piping network, a stand alone gas fired system, the fact there will be dips and bumps in the roadways from unfrozen ground in some areas, and the fact it cost 15 million dollars it does not even come close to a viable project. In industry if a project of this magnitude was presented based on the socalled benefits it would die a rather quick death. If you read the report Gus so kindly provided the link to several weeks ago anyone who understands particulate emissions and corrections factors will soon see the city engineers could not even get that part right. The only way to know the cost per GJ is to know the actual heating load for the city owned building being connected, the amount of heat that will be displaced by the stack gas economiser, and the operating costs per year. Only in PG can a very large amount of money be wasted in the name of generating a photo-op. Will we ever get real answers to the actual savings rather than the usual spin that comes out of city hall, doubtful. Green should add this project to her core review.

Palopu,
Here’s the staff report to council:

http://princegeorge.ca/cityservices/utilities/districtenergy/Documents/Cty_Mngr_District_Energy_report_MERGED_HANDOUT.pdf

You have to convert MWh to GJ. The City is charging (primarily itself) $45 per MWh. It works to $12.50 per GJ.

The part that is really rich is when the engineer says he’s done a net present value calculation that says the project is worth $2.8 million and says that it’s good that it’s a positive number–no kidding!

Basically, if you sold the project today with the revenue stream that it generates, using some unknown interest rate, you’d expect to get about $2.8 million.

Hold on a second. Didn’t we pay $14 million for something that’s worth $2.8 million? Who in their right mind would do that?

The other problem is that the $12.50 per GJ revenue is not quite right. The primary customer is the City. Keep in mind that they were paying about $7.50 per GJ. You can’t consider just the books of the District Energy System in isolation from the rest of the City’s books. The City is taking money from their left pocket and putting it in the right pocket. If you consider both sets of books, it’s costing the City an extra $5 per GJ for heat.

Once you consider this, the District Energy System isn’t worth anywhere near $2.8 million. In fact, it’s one big white elephant.

Oh, by the way midnight worker, I like your approach of using the bedroom count.

So we have three bedrooms sitting on a piece of property that is assessed at $85,300. That makes the cost of the property $85,300/3 = $28,433/bedroom.

Thus the cost of the property for 36 bedrooms would be $28,433 X 36 = $1,023,600.

So, the City paid less for the property than they should have….

I love your approach to math …. did you ever think of teaching as a profession … ;-)

“One would think that term would mean biomass would be consumed to produce heat”

Nope …. community energy system is just what the words say – an energy system for a community – typically a group of buildings such as hospitals, colleges, universities, government offices, industrial complexes, etc., which are tied together to a power source such as gas, coal, oil, hydro.

The current vogue is biomass. But community energy systems existed long before people were thinking of the modern version these systems which tend to stress sustainability and thus use biomass as one of the sources.

from the linked site: http://www.markhamdistrictenergy.com/documents/MDEBackgrounderFactSheet-113010_FINAL.pdf

“District Energy is an internationally accepted method of heating, cooling and powering communities. In many European countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Finland, district energy is mandated by law.

“In Canada, a number of cities and towns have operated district energy systems for many decades.

“The oldest system is in London, Ontario dating back to 1880.

“In Ontario, district energy systems are located in many communities including Toronto, Ottawa, London, Hamilton, Sudbury, Cornwall, and Windsor.”

The fact is that for City buildings, the heat is costing $7.50 per GJ now and with the district energy system it will cost $12.50 per GJ.

The system costs the City an extra $5.00 per GJ to heat City buildings on the district energy system. City owned buildings use an estimated 18,200 GJ of heat per year. That means it costs the City $91,000 per year in extra heating charges.

This doesn’t include the City’s share of debt repayment which works out to an extra $171,000 per year.

The staff report to council makes no mention of this extra costs, but when you take money out of your left pocket and put it in your right pocket, you haven’t made any money.

Bogus revenue (money from left pocket to right pocket for the City) shown on the staff report is: $91,000 heat + $171,000 capital = $262,000 per year.

You have to take the bogus revenue off of the staff cash flow report.

Unfortunately, less revenue means less profit and the total profit now becomes negative for each year.

That’s right, the City loses money each year operating the District Energy System.

How do you get a positive Net Present Value when you lose money each year?

This system is a white elephant.

Do you suppose enough individuals on council will have brains, common sense and the like to oppose the salesman who will eventually come calling on city council to sell them on the idea of a wind turbine destined for Cranbrook Hill so the city can brag that they are lowering their “carbon footprint” in our “Green” (pardon the pun) town?

And when it does happen and the folks on Cranbrook Hill oppose it then we can all sit back and yell “NIMBYS” at them for not caring about climate change/global warming. It’s soooo easy. Can you say “manipulated sheep”? I can.

I think the City will say that it’s costing them $0.50 per kWh to produce the power, but the numbers won’t work so they’ll sell the power back to themselves at $1.20 per kWh and think that they are making money.

It amazes me Irri, how people like you can hide behind the screen while making comments. Let’s see what you’re made of, Meisner leads with his chin every day, he puts his name to the stuff that he writes. Let’s see you do the same. But of course that would mean that you are identified and it is so easy to hide behind your mothers skirt rather than defend your comments. I’m sure Meisner just laughs every day when he sees you post .Enough said.
I may not always agree with meisner, but he is not afraid to say it.

You know, one can turn that around.

I will speak my mind when I am with people I know.

On the other hand, I will not do so when I am speaking to a faceless crowd. Who knows what sort of people are out there listening and willing to make life hard for an individual and/or that person’s family.

Sorry, the notion of public exposure versus privacy goes both ways.

I am willing to meet anyone and have a discussion across a table over a coffee, tea or whatever. But on here, some people, especially those tuned into the community, know who I am, including Ben.

BTW, I have found over the years that it is much easier to defend one’s comments when one is totally anonymous.

The reason? Easy! The words are taken for what they say and are not pre-judged on the basis of who said or wrote them.

We all come with prejudices which we learn over the years. One of the most common is based on human traits – ethnicity, gender, age, title, education, money, clothes, cars, homes, mannerisms, etc. etc.

Many of those do not come into play on the internet. Some will begin to show through in time based on the written words which can carry a variable amount of information about some of those trait if one chooses to keep track of such things.