The City of Prince George's efforts to encourage voter participation (and support) of the Oct. 28 referendum to replace Fire Hall No. 1 and the Four Seasons Pool starts in earnest next week.
In a nutshell, voters are being asked if they are in favour or not of the city borrowing up to $50 million to build a new downtown pool ($35 million) and a new fire hall at the corner of Massey Drive and Carney Street ($15 million). The questions will be posed separately, meaning residents can vote yes for one and no for the other if they so choose.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the city will hold an online town hall on Facebook, where the mayor, city council and senior city managers will talk about the two proposals and then answer questions posed by local news media, as well as queries sent in from viewers. There will also be various public information sessions residents can attend and the city is scheduling tours of both facilities for voters who need to see with their own eyes the sad state both of these old and tired buildings are in.
Mayor Lyn Hall and city manager Kathleen Soltis gave the first of these presentations Wednesday to the Nechako Rotary Club (full disclosure: I am a member of this club, as is Hall, as well as city councillors Terri McConnachie and Garth Frizzell).
Whether it's online or in person, local residents should take the opportunity to inform themselves of the serious issues with the current buildings, as well as the financial details of the replacement plans, before casting their vote at the end of next month.
Perhaps the most important detail voters should know is that these facilities are going to cost taxpayers millions of dollars even if they vote no to borrow the money to replace one or both facilities.
Four Seasons Pool is in such a state of disrepair that city staff estimate a retrofit of the 47-year old building would cost $10 million and that money will have to be spent in the short term just to keep the doors open. In other words, do voters want to spend
$10 million (and eventually more) to upkeep the old pool or $35 million on a new one?
Not moving and building a new Fire Hall No. 1 also has financial implications to local taxpayers. Moving it to its more central location will expand eight-minute response time coverage to nearly all of the Bowl, instead of about half of it currently. For homeowners, fire insurance rates take into account both the distance from the nearest fire hydrant, as well as the distance from the nearest fire hall and the firefighters to operate that hydrant.
In other words, a new, more centrally located fire hall may reduce home insurance rates for Bowl residents.
These are just the financial considerations, of course. There are more practical, longer-term factors as well. Over time, there is no questions that lives and property will be saved when firefighters arrive faster at fires and other emergencies, thanks to a more centralized hall location.
Over time, the health and social benefits of a new downtown pool, particularly for children and seniors, will be felt.
Currently, those kids and elders have to hike up a formidable staircase, which gets dangerously slippery in the winter, to get inside Four Seasons from the parking lot. Speaking of slippery, those poolside tiles are plenty slick already. Both of those safety issues are resolved in a new pool, as is the issue of accessibility for those unable to climb stairs.
Hall made it crystal clear, based on the public feedback he's received, that a replacement pool must be located downtown, rather than at another location, such as next to the YMCA of Northern B.C. Unfortunately, due to time constraints at Wednesday's breakfast meeting, Soltis was unable to offer a detailed explanation of why the YMCA has been called upon to operate Vanderhoof's new pool but can't do the same here in Prince George. Based on the letter to the editor sent in from Paul Faoro, the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in B.C., after the last editorial on this topic, Four Seasons Pool belongs to Prince George residents and the jobs of the people who work there belong to CUPE. The union is not interested in those jobs slipping out of their grasp if the YMCA were tasked with operating the new pool.
If the YMCA is serious about operating a new pool in Prince George (and perhaps even putting capital into the building to reduce building costs), that proposal should be made public for residents to consider, rather than something discussed and then dismissed behind closed doors. Contracting out operations of the new pool is a serious matter with obvious implications for the union and city staff but residents should be allowed to make that part of their consideration on how to vote.
Hopefully that question and many others engaged residents will have will all be addressed in the coming days and weeks.
Looking at these two projects in a broader frame, taxpayers are going to have to get used to opening up their wallets in the years ahead to replace the city's aging infrastructure (Soltis has a slide on that) and keep Prince George with the modern facilities and amenities that helps recruits new residents and keeps the current ones here.
The two decisions voters will make on Oct. 28 are just the first of more to come.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
