This council really needs to think about the community. Seems they are all blinded by a financial focus and forget that Municipalities are designed to provide services to communities.

Short sighted cash grab that will leave this and future generations in the lurch.

Saddens me.

We should recall this mayor and council. Cause in two years we will have nothing left but millions of more debt.

This is just a sell off of land to developers to make them a little richer. That’s what life is all about isn’t it, making the rich richer? Isn’t that what taxpayers are working hard for every day? I know I work hard every day because the rich need my money.

Sell the land holding downtown that is if you can find anyone who wants any of the land.
These people that want to get rid of a golf course are the same people the public had to rally against to stop them from spending 10 million dollars on a dike.
The next civic election can not come soon enough.

Politicians like our city council should really read the histories of heavy-handed rulers who did not rule in the best interests of those they ruled over.
Never a very happy ending (for them).

“Councillor Murry Krause wants to know if there is anything to support the KPMG contention that it will take more than million dollars in capital upgrades.”

Good God where do they these people come from? How long has this guy used up a chair around the table?

KPMG got the figures from the city’s 2012-2016 Provisional Financial Plans page C-71… 1.2 million New Irrigation Install, 2015 Unfunded Future Projects.

BTW Murray there is a further 50k for fence, netting and irrigation repairs at Pine Valley on the books over the next two years and a further 100k to design the new irrigation system…..you might want to start earning that raise you got and start reading some of the information available and come prepared to council meetings. Barring that here’s a word of advice…better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

mayor and council sound like they are on the board for the golf and curling club and see dollars dancing in their eyes.

I wonder how many vacant lots we need around the old pg hotel site. Development downtown won’t happen if they keep inviting them out to the highway. George street will have even more vacant lots if they keep this up.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Maybe council should look at the sweet heart deal the Cougars have in place. Does this deal in fact generate any money for the city coffers or is it a case of out of sight , out of mind.
How about the fancy facility at UNBC the taxpayer subsidizes to the tune of $400,000.00 a year. Eliminate the subsidy.
Bring all sporting facility cost to the fore front and let’s see what it is costing the taxpayer.

You got concerns? or just bellyaching?

The time it takes to post on the blog you can have a short letter emailed to city. The link is below.

This way it gets to everyone on council and mayor. Will be required to be posted on the agenda and minutes for the public to view if I am not mistaken. Especially when that subject is up for review at council meetings is it not?

Another reason for using this email address is that if anyone does an FOI request for certain information it will be there

mayorandcouncil@city.pg.bc

If you didn’t vote for this council then you can’t witch. If you don’t write then don’t witch.

“For me , the writing is on the wall with this one, I don’t want to kid anyone.” … nice vague statement that mean absolutely nothing. If you didn’t want to kid anyone, green, why did you run for mayor then? My concience is clear, I didn’t waste a vote on you.

I don’t get the secrecy around this whole issue. I have a simple suggestion:

1) Release the financial statements for the Pine Valley Golf Course so the people of PG have an idea as to whether it is making many or the extent to which it is subsidized, AND

2) Tell the people of Prince George what the proceeds from the same of the land would be used for (in specific terms) and how the site would be developed after a potential sale.

By having these pieces of information, the residents of the city would be able to make an informed decision as to the future of Pine Valley and the lands it sits on. It may make sense to sell it and it may not. Right now there is nowhere near enough information in the public domain to make a reasoned decision on the matter.

This is not some tiny chunk of land sitting behind the Elk Centre, it’s one of the last substantial pieces of property available for development within the city core. To flip it without detailed consultation and planning simply because “the writing is on the wall” (whatever the heck that means) is a reflection of the collective wisdom and leadership sitting at the council table. In short, there is none.

I agree with NMG. I also think that when the issue of whether we need 6 councillors or 8 councillors goes to a referendum in 2014, we should also have a referendum on whether or not the people of Prince George want a multi million dollar PAC, or if we want the money spent of roads and infrastructure. It will not cost us anything to have this referendum.

Council has two years to get a referendum on the ballot for the PAC, and there is no excuse whatsoever for it not going to referendum. Once the vote is in, we will have finished the debate once and for all

I wonder if we could count on a few councillors to start the ball rolling on this referendum, or will they all sit on thier hands until the issue comes up in 2015/2016 and then vote to take the money out of the Capital Funds Project and build it.

I detect the wretching stench of a big con game being played here.

Here is the letter I wrote to the city today. I believe strongly that we should gather up some names and stsrt the action moving.

‘In regards to the core review, I am totally mortified that you have not removed the fluoride from our water for the first saving of 75 thousand dollars. Even though the majority of the western world recognizes this sludge as carcinogenic as well as a poison, you have continued to baffle us with your belief that it is somehow to our benefit to ingest this daily and have it accumulate in our bodies . How can it possibly be that every person on this Council is that naive? The only people benefitting from this are the dentists and whoever is supplying this “smelting run off”. Those people wishing treatment with flouride can go the dentist and get it but City Council has no mandate to force it on anyone. I believe it is time for a class action lawsuit for medicating the public without consent. I have been pondering this action for some time. Even though it seems counter productive to the goal, it may just remove the uninformed council members from the chambers who can then be replaced with someone who can read and understand a scientific report.

Super tech,
I appreciate your concern over flouride in our water system. I applaud your bravado in calling out council members.
I have a question for you. Why is it that you continue to rant on this subject, share a “letter to the editor” but refuse to post your name…?
IMO, it is one thing to take potshots at City Hall, but another sign you name in an open letter published on the Internet.

Ron J Davis

The mayor says the ‘writing is on the wall’, but then why wasn’t it raised by her during the last civic election?

This is about privatizing key city assets and is akin in my view to the BC Liberals saying they wouldn’t sell BC Rail prior to getting elected and then selling it to their corporate sponsors right after the election. No different from Sherri Greens campaign sponsors being the ones involved in all the recent questionable real-estate deals downtown and now getting a crack at the golden jewels after funding her campaign.

The whole agenda is for insiders only.

I think privatizing the pools is a mistake. If you don’t play hockey its the only civic facilities to get exercise at in the winter months.

I would rather see the pools used to promote the city. Visitors from our region love coming to PG to visit the pools as much as they come here to shop. Its one of the prime draws for PG. I never could understand why we can’t integrate our civic facilities with our tourism like other cities do.

I think a worthwhile program would be to give free pool passes to anyone that rents a hotel room in PG as a subsidy to our hospitality and services industry. Stay at a hotel overnight in PG and get complimentary free passes to spend some time at our pools. We become more of a destination and more of a draw and visitors leave with a better impression of our city. The whole program would probably cost less then the mayors assistant.

ewitt wrote: “KPMG got the figures from the city’s 2012-2016 Provisional Financial Plans page C-71… 1.2 million New Irrigation Install, 2015 Unfunded Future Projects”
This was in response the observation that “Councillor Murry Krause wants to know if there is anything to support the KPMG contention that it will take more than million dollars in capital upgrades.”

Before being hard on a Councillor for a specific item like that, perhaps you should familiarize yourself a bit more with the capital project list and the meaning of the items on it.

The financial plan shows an idealized scheduled replacement for the irrigation system before it takes too much money for maintenance. If you look at the financial plans you will note that there are probably in the hundreds such items which are proposed from minor to major. Many, such as roads that we are very much aware of every day, are simply not funded in a timely fashion and we continue to patch the same potholes many times over the year.

So, rather than taken something as written, which is merely a prediction based on average experience of such systems plus, perhaps, more intimate knowledge of the particular system, he may wish to ask the engineer or technologist (remembering that KPMG did not have such experts look into these systems but merely did some reading and some listening and provided a screened and, in some cases as we have seen, a subjective summary report) responsible for looking after irrigation systems questions of the range of the lifetime of the system and probability of failing now, within 5 years and within 10 years, the nature of the failures and the range of costs of repairing them. It is a risk analysis. Remember, the worst consequence is part or all of the course will not have an automatic system and may lose a season ….. or simply shut the operation down at that time and put the land on sale.

Any reasonable Councillor will do their homework by asking questions in addition to reading. Interestingly, I get the impression that Councillors typically reserve their questions for the open forum instead of talking to staff beforehand and preventing the waste of time at Council. I have not been able to get a feeling of how much of that goes on. It may be frowned upon by this Council or even this Mayor or even other Mayors.

I am totally surprised at the lack of good feasibility studiest that we should be getting for the list povided by KPMG.

I have the sense than whenever the city procures a good or service they explore the issue much more thanwhn they get rid of an asset or discontinue a service they do not do a similar level of due diligence.

It looks to me that they have no procedure, the same as there was probably no procedure when the SD57 closed schools and even began leasing or selling some of them.

If there is such a procedure, I think the City needs to make that public.

All one has to do is watch Council these days and one quickly gets the impression there is no well thought out plan from the leadership – the Mayor, Stolz as chair of the hatchet committee, and the City Manager, whether past or currently acting.

“gets the impression there is no well thought out plan from the leadership”

IMO the most important decision that they will make between now and the next election is choosing the next city manager. As it stands right now we are likely to have another one term mayor and a number of councilors will also be shown the door so this person will be making decisions when others are back selling smelly candles or games for a living.

Given the poor decisions that they have made so far I do not hold out much hope that they will pick the right person to get the running of city hall back on the rails.

I agree that is an important decision. The first thing required is that there is at least one person with the right qualifications in the bunch of applicants.

I hope that if there is not, that they will not go with the Core Services consultant solution and expedite the process even though they ought to go one more round to dig deeper to get the right person.

Quite frankly, I do not have much faith in the group doing a satisfactory hire. The experience thy collectively posses in that area is minimal from waht I can tell. I mean, which one of them in their business has had the expereince of hiring someone who can take charge of even a 20 million dollar operation with say 50 staff and areas of expertise even dealing even with just half the scope?

runner46

The city knows my name!!!

so runner46

My name is Mike Hawryluk. I’m in the book. What’s yours??