Category Archives: Municipal

Caveat emptor, Consider, Municipal

I cannot afford to subsidize Heat ownersip

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The first item I got when I moved to Abbotsford was a Library Card.

The second item was a pool pass as I have a bad back and it is either swim regularly or endure periods of crippling pain, an inability to walk and being bed ridden. Needless to say I am highly motivated to swim five or six times a week. It was seven but my old joints need at least one day a week to recuperate.

During the following two decades I have always held a pool pass. A string that will end when my current pass expires because Abbotsford city council has chosen to push the cost of using city recreational amenities beyond what many citizens can afford.

My back requires me to swim if I want to remain mobile and at a pain level that does not require the use of addictive medications such as morphine to manage the pain. So I will be swimming.

My swimming also significantly benefits the taxpayer’s pocketbook by avoiding the costs of the expensive medical services that would result from the back problems associated with the physical consequences of not swimming.

There are two courses of action I can take and will be exploring.

The first is to swim only during the times, the very limited times, of ‘cheap swims’ when the admission price is much more affordable. That limits me to a maximum of four one hour long swims a week, the minimum I need to swim to benefit from swimming. It also means that swimming becomes a ‘cannot miss’ item on my schedule as opposed to the timing flexibility of a pass.

The other option is to check out the private facilities that have pools to see if their pools will meet my needs vis-à-vis swimming lengths. Private facilities because under Abbotsford’s current council’s mismanagement the city’s public facilities are the most expensive facilities in town.

I am sure that someone from city council or management will state that the city gives a credit to those citizens who living (well) below the poverty line; that the city raised the credit by 50% this year. Ignoring or obscuring the fact that it would have taken a 120% increase just to cover the 20% increase in ARC admission fees this year.

Actually, if you factor in the double digit increase that resulted from the two price increases the year before, the cost to use ARC has gone up 35% over the past 18 months.

In order to merely stay even the recreation credit needed to increase by 195%, four times the actual 50% increase. Leaving those who can least afford to pay increased fees significantly worse off than they were just 18 months ago.

Now if I could afford to go to UFV my UFV U-PASS would get me unlimited access to Abbotsford recreational facilities. What does the city collect for this access? $5 per term!

For the same four month period that the city collects $5 per student they charge me $200 – 4000% more. Where is Mayor Peary’s ‘user pay’ or fairness here?

As if having those living in poverty subsidize UFV students was not insulting or outrageous enough, there is the matter of subsidizing a professional hockey team and ownership – the Heat.

It is not only those who struggle to survive living in poverty who cannot afford to attend events at AESC. The working poor, indeed many working families period, cannot afford to attend events at AESC.

Yet we all pay to subsidize ever posterior in a seat at AESC when we use city facilities.

Council constantly cites the need to provide public amenities to attract people to Abbotsford.

Yet, while the city has added the Plan A amenities for those wealthy enough to afford them, it has imposed fee increases across the board at public facilities that deny and/or significantly reduce access to ALL facilities for a substantial percentage of Abbotsford’s citizens.

The purpose of public facilities is to provide public amenities and access to those facilities for ALL citizens, particularly families and children, not just a privileged few. The purpose is NOT to provide cash flow to pay for council’s lack of fiscal acumen and common sense.

Public facilities fees should be the lowest (or at worst among the lowest) in the city in order to maximize public access to and use of facilities. Public facilities fees should not be the highest, thus minimizing public access to facilities and participation in recreational activities.

Municipal, Snafu

Abbotsford council votes to turn Essendene into virtual parking lot.

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Bob Bos was correct about one point concerning the proposed changes to Essendene Avenue – it is a “no-brainer”.

Any city councillor who would and did vote for this has no brain. Or alternatively has a brain but is brain-dead.

Essendene is the major connector for traffic travelling from the west side of Abbotsford to the east side of Abbotsford accessed via Old Yale Road for the simple reason there is no other even semi-convenient route from between west and east.

Say what you will about city staff, at least they had the common sense to recognize that with approximately 16,000 vehicles a day using Essendene cutting the number of lanes in half (from two in each direction to one each way) is a recipe for monumental daily day long traffic jam.

Not to mention the problems and congestion it cause on other streets and at other intersections as people seek routes to avoid a 30 plus minute traffic crawl through downtown old Abbotsford.

Bos stated “It looks busy with four lanes. Three lanes gives the impression of less traffic and will create a change in atmosphere.”

It does not just look busy it is busy. And that is with two lanes in each direction. Reducing traffic to one lane in each direction is not going to give the impression of less traffic – it is going to give the impression of a parking lot,

I do concede it will create a change in atmosphere. Although why Mr. Bos and city council feel the need to provoke road rage in downtown old Abbotsford …

“The two-block area of Essendene has more than a half-dozen vacancies and Bos said the lane alteration will change that.”

It will definitely change that. I am just not sure why city council or Mr. Bos think increasing the vacancy rate in the downtown core by driving the customers downtown businesses depend on to stay in business away from the downtown is a good idea?

Creating the planned traffic nightmare will cause those who absolutely do not have to go downtown to avoid downtown and cause those who have to pass through the downtown area to be focused on getting through the traffic jam ASAP, not on spending more time in backed up traffic by stopping downtown.

Apparently council feels they have not created enough fiscal problems for the city and feel compelled to waste $533,000.00 turning downtown into a disaster area.

Given the ruination council has brought about in city finances this is not only fiscally irresponsible behaviour, it is reckless and reprehensible behaviour.

Council does not have the money to do needed road maintenance but can find funds for this? Just what is council planning to cut from the budget to pay for this fecklessness? More fireman?

I would suggest that the salaries of those councillors who voted to turn Essendene into a virtual parking lot be used to pay for this debacle.

It is well past time council be held responsible for their irresponsible behaviours.

Caveat emptor, Municipal, Snafu

Another Abbotsford Fudge-a-Budget

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Fudge: to avoid coming to grips with something

One has to wonder why city council bothers with a budget or if they would bother with a ‘budget’ if it were not required by the province of BC’s Local Government Act.

While council pays lip service to creating a ‘budget’ this year’s fudget (council’s fudge-a-budget) process has made it unequivocally clear that the needs of the city, Reality, fiscally responsibility and common sense were of minimal (if any) concern to council in arriving at 2010’s fudget-it-budget.

Council’s behaviour, directions to staff and staff’s report highlight that council’s focus is on creating a fudge-it-budget that isn’t going to jeopardize their chances of re-election.

Financial staff’s original draft for 2010 was for a 6% increase but council directed financial staff to come up with an increase closer to 3.9% which led to the 4.4% proposal accepted by council, excerpted below.

“The capital budget (which they describe in their report as “already significantly underfunded”) did not increase in 2009 and the roads and facility infrastructure continue to deteriorate. A one per cent increase is not significant, but acknowledges the growing gap in infrastructure funding,” they wrote.

The authors noted several challenges in trying to meet the council’s directive: the fragility of the roads and capital projects program; an underfunded reserve fund.

Fire services would take a significant hit of $350,000 in 2010. 2010 marks the fifth year in a row where increase will be below city costs, they said.

Continue to deteriorate, as in this is not the first year that council has made the decision to allow roads and facility infrastructure to deteriorate.

At what point would council find it necessary to stop allowing roads and facilities to deteriorate and begin proper maintenance? When cars start disappearing into potholes? When we get a head-on collision because drivers cannot see the road marking lines in the dark or rain? When facilities have to be closed because they are unsafe or buildings start falling down.

Council happily spends money on plasma flat screen televisions and on an unnecessarily, expensive large, colour electronic outdoor sign for ARC but won’t spend to do the maintenance necessary to maintain ARC and other facilities.

Money isn’t spent until the lack of maintenance causes a breakdown, such as an ice-plant, where it costs many times more to do repairs than it would have cost to do maintenance; standard operating procedure under Abbotsford’s council.

Fragile is not a word one wants used in describing roads and capital projects. Still that is better than underfunded in reference to the city’s reserve fund; which is preferable to hearing about the growing gap in infrastructure funding.

Council opted for a significant hit to Fire services despite the danger of lengthened response times and increased property losses. Given the gamble with lives and property in that decision one wonders why councillors are opposed to a casino. Or is it just taxpayers money, property and lives council likes to gamble with?

Sneaky – an increased turnaround time for development applications will have developers going to other cities and council won’t have to add any meetings to handle increased city business.

The need for early closure of some recreation facilities and/or reductions in programming will cause less wear and tear on buildings so the lack of maintenance won’t be as noticeable or potentially costly.

Reduced responsiveness to citizens as a result of reduced staff means council and senior staff won’t be bothered by citizens as much and provides an excuse for avoiding/not answering citizen’s questions.

With the existing poor levels of park maintenance who will notice increased litter or grass several inches longer?

A reduced ability to repair potholes and intersection rutting should serve to provide a distraction to divert driver’s attention from the inexcusable deteriorating roads to the “we’re keeping taxes down” potholes and rutting. Of course this policy could prove costly if citizen’s start billing city hall for the cost of tires and suspensions ‘deteriorated’ by the city’s deteriorated roads.

Even the most cursory examination of the 2010 ‘budget’ process/proposal makes it abundantly clear that council is aware of numerous failings of their so-called ‘budget’ – and chooses to avoid dealing with the many financial, operating and capital problems that have come to plague the City of Abbotsford precisely because of councils repeated refusal to behave with fiscal responsibility, make tough decisions and/or deal with the fallout from their poor financial decision making and priorities.

Phone council, write them, talk to them prior to their secret budget meeting on January 4, 2010 and ask councillors where the city’s portion of the McCallum ($8.3 million) and Clearbrook ($8.3 million) interchanges ($16.6 million in total) is going to come from since it was not included in the budget.

Tell council to stop digging Abbotsford into an ever deeper financial hole and demand council act responsibility in beginning to address the chaos council has caused the city, its finances and its taxpayers.

Caveat emptor, Municipal

‘big time’ is Earned not Bought.

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“Ask the people in Chilliwack the last time they had a Tragically Hip concert,” he (Mayor Peary) said.

Why would any Chilliwack council, councillor or taxpayer want to be so financially irresponsible and foolish?

Particularly when just an easy twenty minute drive down Highway 1 in Abbotsford is a council and councillors willing not only to burden their taxpayers with the highest per-household debt load in the lower mainland but to subsidise tickets to the tune of $100 per posterior in a seat.

Any resident of Chilliwack with any common sense would be happy to keep their city’s debt at $0, leave Abbotsford groaning under the burden of the highest per-household debt in the lower mainland, take the $100 per person seat subsidy paid for by Abbotsford’s beleaguered taxpayers and drive to Abbotsford to see the Hip.

Tragically, being fiscally responsible is behaviour that Abbotsford’s council and councillors seem unable to grasp.

While there is a certain truth in the mayors statement “If you’re going to borrow money, the time to do that is when rates are low” common sense should tell you that it does not matter how good the interest rate is, if you borrow an amount large enough debt repayment will have a significant negative effect on finances and financial health.

Borrow an amount sufficiently large to negatively impact finances and financial health and you have to raise taxes, levies and fees and/or cut costs by reducing services.

If you are going to borrow money, whatever the interest rate, you need to understand and consider what effect repayment will have on cash flow and finances.

And just what is the point of speaking of previous councils borrowing money at 8% or even 10% when that debt was paid off?

“said Peary, adding that previous councils had aggressively paid off debt at the expense of updating services”

Previous councils did not update services in order to pay off debt. As opposed to this council which, to pay off debt, is cutting services. And Mayor Peary favours the current councils approach – why?

“Peary said despite the Frontier Centre’s numbers, previous councils’ decisions to take Abbotsford into the big leagues are in the past and the city’s investments are trumping any neighbour’s ability to poo-poo the debt load.”

Reading the above followed by “”Ask the people in Chilliwack the last time they had a Tragically Hip concert” one is left expecting to hear nya-nya-nya-nya nyhaaaa.

Apparently, rather than a capable and thoughtful city council, Abbotsford is being run by a group with more in common with a group of ten year olds.

A group of 10 year olds that has, sadly, saddled Abbotsford with the highest per-household debt in the lower mainland, so they can boast ‘mine’s bigger than yours’. Although this need for ego projects does go a long way towards explaining councils Plan A at any cost attitude.

While the cost of cleaning up all the unfavourable fallout that results from these unwise decisions and actions rouses exasperation even ire, the Mayor’s words “previous councils’ decisions to take Abbotsford into the big leagues” tend to evoke pity.

For it is something to be pitied that council thinks one can buy a city into ‘the big leagues’; that what makes for a first class city is merely structures and facilities; that accumulating the right list of possessions makes a city ‘big league.

I am not saying that infrastructure is not important; what I am saying is that it is not big ego projects that are important in a first rate city but items such as streets that do not devour tires or car suspensions and that you can safely drive at night because you can see the line markings or neatness of appearance as opposed to Abbotsford’s “look[ing] a little scruffier, with less street sweeping, less grooming of parks and city flower beds and reduced bylaw enforcement.”

Any council can build monuments to their egos as long as the are willing to abandon common sense and fiscal responsibility and crush citizens under debt and ever climbing taxes, levies and fees, while cutting services.

What makes a city a City of Note  is not constructed of concrete but is constructed of intangibles and character.

A reputation for/as a good place to do business (not as a bureaucratic nightmare); sound financial management (not as a debt ridden black hole insatiably consuming taxpayer dollars); maintaining infrastructure (not as a city whose infrastructure is falling apart from lack of maintenance or needed investment); as a place where all can afford to participate in sports and fitness (not for fees so high increasing numbers of children and citizens simply cannot afford to participate).

Councils ill-advised decisions were not “decisions to take Abbotsford into the big leagues” but decisions that have made Abbotsford less liveable and reinforced the city’s reputation, outside of the legend that exists only in the ‘council think’ of councils minds, as ‘the hick city in the country’.

Municipal, Snafu

Reality vs. Council Think

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Council bears no responsibility for the sad state of the City of Abbotsford’s finances and the fact Abbotsford has the highest municipal debt-per-household in the lower mainland?

Even for Abbotsford “council think” this strains the bounds of credulity. Although given the disastrous state of the city’s finances, cuts to services and a municipal election less than two years away it was only a matter time before city politicians began to revise history in an attempt to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions/decisions.

Apparently, in the revisionist council version of the history of Plan A, council are innocent bystanders whose involvement in Plan A was merely that of obeying the wishes of taxpayers.

Even if you overlook that Plan A was initiated by council who led the cheering squad for Plan A; who spent $140,000.00 taxpayer dollars on advertising to sell taxpayers on Plan A; who denied the rights of those who opposed Plan A by denying them access to city buildings even as the pro-Plan A council plastered city buildings with pro-Plan A propaganda and whose conduct during the referendum process was such that the BC Ombudsman’s office and the Ministry of Community and Rural Development have developed guidelines for future municipal referendums in order to prevent future abuses; it is a far-fetched, preposterous revision of history to suggest that the fallout from Plan A is NOT the responsibility of Abbotsford’s council and city hall.

Shall we have a historical reality check?

Yes the citizens of Abbotsford voted, by the slimmest of margins, to borrow $85 million to build Plan A. But that was not a blank cheque to build Plan A at any cost to the city.

In seeking the approval of citizens for Plan A, council made commitments and guarantees to the citizens of Abbotsford to win approval of Plan A. Among these commitments and guarantees were that the maximum amount that was to be spent on Plan A was set at $85 million; undertakings were given that contracts with the builders would guarantee the cost of Plan a would not go 1 cent over the taxpayer approved maximum of $85 million; expenditures from reserves for any amount of spending on Plan A was never raised for approval and therefore never approved by taxpayers; that while the museum/art gallery and ARC addition would need yearly subsidies the Sports and Entertainment Complex would not need any subsidy, indeed council guaranteed this Complex would be a source of positive cash flow and not a black hole for city dollars.

The $45 million plus over expenditure was not only solely the decision and responsibility of council and staff, but was against the will of the citizens who put a cap of $85 million on expenditures in voting for and agreeing to the Plan A terms and conditions set out by council.

Indeed council should either have shelved plan A or gone back to the public for approval when they realized that Plan A would require expenditures in excess of $85 million approved by citizens.

Since council was aware, but did not disclose, that expenditures in excess of the $85 million agreed to by taxpayers would be required even before the referendum, no expenditures for Plan A should ever have been made.

The recent announcement of the $2.3 million (if lucky) subsidy required by the Sports and Entertainment Complex this year (with increasing subsidies in future years) was predictable at the time of the referendum even to someone living homeless in their car using only a piece of blank paper, a pencil and $1 calculator with the simple application of basic math skills and common sense.

In light of this the fact council and city staff issued guarantees of a positive cash flow raise questions about their common sense or veracity or both.

With council having withheld pertinent information from taxpayers about Plan A costs during the referendum and failing to comply with the direction given to council by taxpayers that costs for Plan A were not to exceed $85 million, it is facetious to suggest that citizens in any way approved the financial mess that is Plan A.

An examination of the facts makes clear that citizens did not give approval for Plan A as implemented by council. That if council had been forthright with taxpayers or behaved as directed by taxpayers or behaved with integrity and honour Plan A would have been shelved and the city and its future would be in much better financial shape.