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Letters  

Thanks to the 12 seniors

As an opposing view to the Brad Miller's letter in the May 3, 2016 Castanet, I offer the following; 

I thank the 12 seniors who got together to stop the AAP for the New City Hall in West Kelowna. I too spoke with several of them. There was no pushing, no coercion and no bulling in any way, just detailed information from their point of view. Without people like the 12 seniors, the rest of West Kelowna would have known little about the borrowing and the location of the proposed New City Hall.

I attended all of the City Information session on the proposed City Hall and asked the same questions at all of them and I still could not get adequate answers, even at the last one at the library. The City Staff did not know enough to answer specific questions like:

  • Why do they need 1 Million for furniture, fixtures and equipment (approximately $14,000 per employee) when they already have all of this and are in fact spending another $400,000 on I.T. this year?
     
  • Where is everyone going to park? The proposed City Hall only has 33 underground parking spots and must share the 60+ ground level spots with the private office building and the two residential buildings. There are 71 City Staff that would have been moving into this building. Where are they and the visitors to all of the buildings going to park?
     
  • Why is the City spending $655,000 on this out of the way, private location, when they have under-utilized City Owned property just down the road on Elliott Road or on Bartley Road?
     
  • According to their own City Hall accommodation plan back in 2012, they only need approximately 24,000 square feet by 2020, yet they are building over 32,000 square feet. When asked if they were going to lease out the top floor of approximately 10,000 square feet they said only 5,000 would be leased out.
     
  • Why was the cost of building the New City Hall approximately 15% - 20% greater per square foot than the office building being proposed? No Answer!
     
  • Not once, would any of them acknowledge the financing costs that would bring the total cost to the “taxpayers” of this proposed new City Hall to over $18 million (not the $14.8 they mentioned and the $10.5 they tried to focus upon).

It goes on and on. The City Staff at the information sessions just did not know the details of this proposal or were just relying on the information supplied by the private developer and/or consultant(s).

I find it disturbing that there was only a 32% turnout of eligible voters in the last West Kelowna election. Was this apathy or were the citizens just too busy to hear about an election? Thanks to the 12 seniors, the taxpayers were able to be informed. I hope the City will listen and not spend what they don’t have.

A citizen of West Kelowna who appreciates the 12.

Thomas Lovell



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The opinions expressed here are strictly those of the author. Castanet does not in any way warrant the information presented.


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