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Lorne Gunter: Secretive Edmonton council putting the squeeze on taxpayers over Lewis Farms rec centre

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According to Mayor Andrew Knack, the city is not being sneaky about the cost overrun at the Lewis Farms rec centre in the far west end. By withholding how much more the project will cost than originally budgeted (despite voting 11-1 on Wednesday to cover that cost), council and the administration are just being prudent.

Whenever a government is spending taxpayers’ dollars it has an obligation to inform the public of how much it is because that has a direct bearing on how high the public’s taxes will go.

How can voters express their approval or disapproval for any given project unless they can weigh the cost against the potential benefits?

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If they knew how much over budget the rec centre will be, perhaps Edmontonians would still support it. I doubt it, but anything is possible I suppose.

However, by voting to approve the increased cost without letting taxpayers know what that cost will be, council and administration just look like they’re trying to pull one over on people whose taxes will be jacked up to cover those added expenses.

Whether you’re in favour of forging ahead with a public project that has a ballooning price tag or not, I hope you can agree that council’s pig-in-a-poke approach is wrong.

It’s as if council is saying, “Trust us, folks. We’re going to vote to raise your taxes, but we’re just not going to tell you by how much. That’s OK, right?”

I’ve been out to the Lewis Farms Community Recreation Centre and Library, and even after a lot of attractions and facilities have been cut back or deleted all together, the centre is still overbuilt. It’s not that there are too many amenities but rather than the design to too elaborate. Glass walls, overhanging rooflines and plenty of empty space are running up the cost.

Maybe you disagree with me that when council is spending tax dollars, the amounts it is spending should be publicly declared. Maybe you accept Mayor Knack’s explanation that if the added amount council is approving were disclosed before all the construction bids had been received, contractors would just jack up their bids by the amount council had approved.

Could happen, I guess. But governments are often poor project mangers. For instance, it was governments that invented the “cost-plus” method of project funding. Governments agreed to make taxpayers pay whatever bills contractors ran up, plus a fixed amount of profit.

Council and administration are not spending their own money. There isn’t the same incentive to be careful.

The calculation in a public official’s mind is not, “If we spend this money will we still make money.” Rather, it’s, “Just how much can we squeeze the taxpayers before they vote us out of office.”

And given that the eight lefty members of the previous council who stood for re-election won last October despite overseeing some of the highest tax increases in Edmonton’s history, the answer they hear in their minds is, “We can squeeze ‘em, a lot.”

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Administration claims to have dramatically reduced the scale of the project. A 30-metre-by-25-metre deep-dive tank and high-diving boards have been cancelled. The fitness centre and gymnasiums have been reduced by 45,000 square feet. A climbing wall has been removed and an outdoor skating rink, three baseball diamonds, outdoor basketball and tennis courts, a mega spray park and a skatepark have all also been cancelled or postponed.

The city pleads that inflation has caused these cost overruns. And there is some truth in that. Inflation is running at nearly double the rate of when the project was first suggested nearly 20 years ago.

But inflation didn’t cause three successive councils to postpone the entire project again and again. All the while, costs escalated.

This is as much the fault of council’s dithering and administration’s incompetence as it the Consumer Price Index.

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