Paging Eric Allen.
If there's one man in Prince George able to remind local politicians who really calls the shots, especially when it comes to public spending, it's Allen.
In 2012, when the City of Prince George proposed to borrow
$3.56 million to pay for the city's portion of the $11.5 million cost to build a 3.3 kilometre dike along River Road, Allen took the city on.
He needed to get 5,351 signatures on a petition between March 5 and April 24 to force the city to take the borrowing plan to a referendum.
He got 9,271 signatures and the city council of the day - a majority of which are still on the job (Lyn Hall, Frank Everitt, Brian Skakun, Murry Krause and Garth Frizzell) - walked away from the proposal.
Perhaps these five gents think the dike project would have gone through if Shari Green wasn't the mayor at the time.
Perhaps they think that because the referendum results on building a new Fire Hall No. 1 and a replacement for the aging Four Seasons Pool were positive, there will be no push-back on the city's plan to borrow $32.2 million to pay for 11 capital projects. If someone - like Allen, for example - doesn't collect 5,546 signatures or more before May 30 in opposition to all or some of the 11 proposed projects, the city will go ahead and borrow the money to complete the work.
The proposed projects include $10.2 million to renovate the Prince George Aquatic Centre, $5 million on street light and traffic signal replacement, $4.7 million to replace the roofs on various civic facilities and $2.7 million to further upgrade Masich Stadium, which already saw $4.5 million pumped into it over the past two years.
The easiest target would be the aquatic centre. It was built 20 years ago for $9 million, approved by local taxpayers in the same referendum that gave the thumbs up to the construction of the Multiplex.
In a 2017 referendum, 62.5 per cent of the handful of residents who bothered to vote supported borrowing $35 million to replace Four Seasons Pool.
It's a sad irony that the number of people who voted yes - 4,923 - was enough to give the city the mandate to go ahead but it will take 5,546 signatures to force all or part of the city's borrowing plan to a vote.
Looking back to 2012, the real beef wasn't actually about the dike but concern from residents that the city council and the new mayor, freshly elected just a few months earlier, weren't working hard enough to control spending.
"The City of Prince George never seems to have sufficient money to look after our roads or infrastructure, however they don't seem to have any problem borrowing huge sums of money for their special projects, which result in further tax increases and further debt," Allen wrote in a letter to the editor announcing his efforts to collect enough signatures to put a stop to the borrowing plan.
Perhaps it's time this city council received a similar reminder that the past four years of big pay raises for the senior managers and mayor and council, hefty tax hikes and significant increases in hiring and spending are quite enough for now.
Perhaps it's time for Allen - or someone just like him, armed with little more than pens, paper and sustained outrage - to put this city council on notice about its seeming neverending willingness to raise taxes and spend money.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
