Quote:
Originally Posted by Tacheguy
I think Bowman could have achieved the same goal without discrediting people in the process. He could have met with the board of cv and said: look you guys have been set up to operate a certain way, but I have decided to change direction on that. In addition, I want to hit the reset button on the Carlton site in keeping with the new direction that we are going to follow.Thank you for the work you have done on behalf of the community up to this point. Some people might not have liked it but they all would have had graceful exits.
These arms length agencies are a mixed blessing. They are designed to keep politicians out of development deals, but then they are criticized for a lack of transparency. I see Gerry brown in California discontinued public funding for 300 such agencies, arguing that the money will be better spent on education.
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The new Sheriff in town needs to hang the outlaw in the public square to let everybody know that things are going to be done differently. Not one of these people deserves a graceful exit. That's the punishment for being a poor steward of the public; you leave in a shameful way. Ross McGowan already got to leave with a fawning farewell in the paper and a nice publicly funded party. Was Barry Thorgrimson supposed to given a beautiful sendoff in addition to his pension after spending the last ten years screwing the city by all means necessary? This is nonsense.
Everybody needs to get past this sentiment that all major development is good because it's not. The Chipmans/Thomsons/Artis - whoever - are not a charity. They aren't. Not a single one of them could care less about the city's bottom line. They are interested in this strictly for their own purposes on their terms. If they're going to build something, it's going to be profitable. If It's not, it's going to be made so at the expense of the city. And if it turns out that the project doesn't generate enough property tax (because everybody's being overly liberal with the estimates), then the taxpayer eats it. You know what never happens? The taxpayer never shares in the upside.
The Chipman family is so altruistically involved in the city and its development that after receiving funding from all three levels of government to build their moneymaker, they successfully lobbied to have the property categorized as recreational cutting their property tax by 80% and costing the city hundreds of thousands in annual business taxes.
The Chipman family thinks we're so stupid they claim the MTS Centre is not a business; it's a hockey rink like the one at your local community centre that sells a few chocolate bars at the canteen.
CentreVenture has been staffed by mostly incompetence for the better part of its 15 years. But it didn't need to have its lunch eaten because its only mandate was to give it away. There's nothing this quasi-NGO was doing that a moslty inept public service wasn't already doing or couldn't have easily done. It just got to hide behind a veil of secrecy while doing it.