By John Francis
The Lion’s Head Arena/Community Centre renovation has become a bit of a fiasco. The municipality planned an elaborate expansion on a site that turned out to have drainage problems. Council has — wisely, in my opinion — decided to stop throwing good money after bad. They will see if they can find another site for future community infrastructure.
“But they shoulda known there were problems with that site” say the armchair planners.
OK — let’s explore that.
Who should have known?
The Facilities Manager? He was hired in the final stages of the project planning process to help manage construction but he wasn’t part of the decision to begin that expansion.
The previous Facilities Manager? Basically there wasn’t one. Maybe we should blame the guy who drives the Zamboni?
The last assessment of the arena facility was done in 2006. It was fit for purpose at the time but, it turns out, insufficiently detailed for the development proposed for 2024. Was that a fault of that 2006 assessment? Should the municipality have done a full engineering study in 2006 even though they didn’t really know what they wanted to do at the site?
More recently — should the municipality have done a full engineering study before they considered expanding the arena facility?
That would have looked pretty stupid if the public consultation process told them all they needed to do was add a few dressing rooms.
So — what should a municipality do first? A needs assessment? A public consultation? A septic and drainage engineering study? A traffic flow study? Discussions with stakeholders? Discussions with public funding agencies?
The arena site is almost five acres, which is adequate for what was planned. It is in an excellent location vis à vis traffic flow — visiting teams can get to it without going through the village. It has adequate parking. It’s on town water. It has adequate hydro availability. There have never been any drainage or flooding issues.
What’s not to like?
When an organization manages to accomplish things on a shoestring budget, everybody admires their efficiency. But when they do it over and over again, it becomes routine and onlookers forget that every project that goes off without a hitch is a minor miracle.
It’s like acrobats working without a net. Everything is fine until… splat.
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One of the unavoidable consequences of MNBP having the region’s lowest tax rate and smallest budget is that municipal council and staff are constantly working without a net. Mostly they get away with it through savvy and competence. This time, they didn’t.
It is to their credit that, as soon as Wes Rydall warned them there was a problem, they engaged engineers to investigate.
But the question remains: do we really want to have the lowest tax rates, hang staff and council out to dry and watch our facilities go to hell in a handcart?
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The Agenda for Council’s Special Budget Meeting on Feb 5 includes a list of the 84 buildings and facilities MNBP owns and maintains. (Read it online — it’s an eye-opener.)
Several of those facilities were built in the 19th century; very few of them were built in the 21st. I am guessing that a considerable majority of them don’t meet current codes. A lot of them have serious problems.
It’s not just the arena.
Council has to decide whether it’s worth fixing them — a complex question involving site and structural factors and user considerations. Times 84.
The Meeting Place building in Tobermory is a perfect example. It’s a prefab, assembled 35 years ago as temporary offices for Parks Canada, with a projected useful life of 25 years. It has a clumsy layout, no foundation, a contaminated well, inadequate insulation, a leaky, flat roof and a 35-year-old septic system. Repair any one of those things and the others are still problems. But the facility gets a lot of use and the community depends on it.
Then there’s the old township office/daycare building in Tobermory. Built 60-some years ago with an addition put on in the 1980s, it is leaky, drafty, mouldy and has chronic flooding problems, which keep getting worse as the land uphill on Cape Hurd Road gets developed and no longer soaks up the rain. Fix any one of those things and the others are still problems.
The obvious answer is to tear down both buildings and put up a proper facility that is tailor-made to the users’ requirements. And finance it how, exactly? Out of reserves? As Mayor McIver has pointed out repeatedly — that cupboard is bare.
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Perhaps it’s time to stop bragging about having the lowest tax rates within a day’s drive. Perhaps it’s time to stop trying to appease the chronic tax-complainers and accept that they will never stop complaining, no matter how low the taxes are.
Every other municipality in Bruce County has tax rates at least 50% higher than ours and some of them are double. Maybe they know something we don’t…
