I mostly agree.

As I was at the Monday, August 29th GIC meeting at City Hall, I can tell you that the Hamilton Community News editorial 'Fiddling while Hamilton burns' gets a ton right. Not everything...but enough. It's on the site, but I'm publishing it here for your convenience. 

Fiddling while Hamilton burns

The City of Hamilton has proven, yet again, that if you allow officials and politicians any freedom, taxpayers will eventually pay the price for their bumbling.

For reasons only known to people within the deepest bowels of city hall, taxpayers are now footing the bill for a new Ivor Wynne Stadium and are poised to pay triple the price for a new velodrome.

The double whammy of a new stadium, plus the ballooning costs of a velodrome has left taxpayers slack jawed at the incompetency of a malfunctioning city. And the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of a sleepy and indifferent council that has allowed city staff to run roughshod over residents’ wishes.

Ivor Wynne stadium is a classic example of indifference to accountability. Fresh off a resounding victory to renovate Ivor Wynne for the Tiger-Cats and the Toronto 2015 Pan Am games in January, at what was then believed to be a sustainable $152 million, the secret meetings began. A review of the stadium designs found that if the north stands were retro-fitted as planned, it would exceed the city’s building codes.
So what do the Tiger-Cats, Infrastructure Ontario and city staff do? Without informing council, they decide among themselves to simply rebuild the north stands, as they are doing with the south stands. In essence, taxpayers are now building a new stadium for the Tiger-Cats after the community fought against shoveling more money to the private company for a new facility.

City officials are telling the public they don’t need to worry, that a new stadium can be built within the current budget. Should taxpayers believe them?

And just to make sure that the Ivor Wynne Stadium bait and switch strategy wasn’t an anomaly, during the same time period, city staff, a few councillors, Infrastructure Ontario and cycling officials decided among themselves to select Mohawk College as the preferred location for the velodrome. Then they told councillors earlier this week during the first committee meeting on the velodrome since last August that, by the way, the cost for the facility has gone up from $11.5 million to a budget-busting $49.5 million.

Huh?

City officials said the original price tag didn’t include “soft costs,” such as design and pre-construction. Ian Troop, chief executive officer for Toronto 2015, babbled something about the original estimate for the facility being based on a figure supplied by a now bankrupt construction company.

Why should Hamilton taxpayers accept this bafflegab?

The city has committed $60 million toward the Pan Am Games, sucking the money out of its Hamilton Future Fund to near zero for the stadium and $5 million for the velodrome. Politicians in the last municipal election pledged they would not budge from that $60 million figure. But as the financial realities became apparent this week, the city needs to invest at least another $5 million into the velodrome – which will still leave at least a $12-million gap that needs to be filled – if Hamilton wants such a facility.

The entire Pan Am Games process has been flawed from the start. From the very beginning, there was no business case to have the games in Hamilton, nor was a financial strategy established for the city to pay for the games. Those mistakes have resulted in councillors scrambling to fill funding gaps, while allowing secret deals and closed-door negotiations with the Tiger Cats, Mohawk College and cycling organizations, which have no interest in these facilities beyond trying to get the municipality to foot the bill. And since the Pan Am Games is a provincial initiative, Hamilton has become a willing pawn in this entire miserable situation

Didn’t councillors learn during the last municipal election that residents were fed up with secret deals, rising taxes and politicians allowing the city to spend money it doesn’t have to benefit their friends?

Unfortunately, the only thing politicians have absorbed, is that they have become willing stooges in the dismantling of the city’s financial future.