Editor: Municipal administration quoted $37 million to upgrade the current Civic Centre but apparently failed to supply a detailed costing that would verify to council and the taxpayer a level of legitimacy of that price tag.
One wonders if council made the decision to move to the downtown location without comprehensive and verifiable facts.
On Jan. 26, a Freedom of Information request was filed, asking for a detailed costing breakdown of bringing the Civic Centre to code. The municipality wants $120 to provide the requested information to taxpayers, citing it will take four hours to find at $30 per hour.
This information should have been readily available for council to have made any decisions, and, for the sake of transparency, to the public before a move downtown. The municipality doesn’t seem to have, nor did they submit to council, complete, accurate and comprehensive records verifying that costs have doubled in four years to renovate the Civic Centre.
Municipal staff have requested more than 30 additional days to gather information; information that should have been readily available and provided to council. Yet again it looks like council made a serious decision based on administration’s say so.
We understand ROA architects, a local Chatham-Kent firm retained by the municipality, did the three costings on the Civic Centre for 2017, 2018 and 2023. The estimates were $14.4M in 2017 and $18.1M a year later. Both proposals would have upgraded the Civic Centre to current building codes and moved council chambers to the main floor.
The Civic Centre was designed to be an office building; the Sears building was designed to be a department store.
Council should never have allowed anything other than an independent company, free of any inherent bias, to oversee both quotations – renovating the Civic Centre and revamping the Sears building to handle C-K operations, the museum and the library – to ensure that both quotes use the same market assumptions, calculations and values. Quotes received from contractors can vary significantly.
The Sears proposal supposedly increases the library square footage by 50 per cent for more programs and was recommended by the Library Association of Ontario based on C-K’s population rather than using data generated by current Chatham-Kent library users. Expanding the library would be the wishes of library people, which is understandable. Library programs may be better served if overseen by our education system rather than the municipality anyway.
An open market competition on both the Civic Centre and Sears building would be the fairest and most responsible means to make an informed decision.
Additionally, the Sears building renovation sets groundwork to expand local government when we should be in a direction to minimize government size, especially when the citizenry will be hit with ever-increasing costs supporting a runaway government system at all levels.
John Cryderman
Chatham
