The two faces of Mayor Kelly!

From the left hand face we hear, we can afford the new Convention centre despite the hundreds of millions it will cost us.

From the right hand face he tells us we have tens of millions in "short falls" and we will face tax hikes (as always) and service cuts (as always) with no decrease in taxes to match the decrease in service

You have to wonder if either head has a brain that can do basic math and add and subtract!
SOME SUGGESTIONS
We pay for the services leave them in place as mandated
Kill the new Convention centre
Revise the way over priced excessive new library to a sensible building.
Kill the football stadium that will sit Idle most of the year
Kill the high speed ferry from Bedford.
Stop paying to bring money losing concerts and sporting events to HRM.
Cut council numbers in half
Remove the discretionary spending fund.
If Mayor Kelly can't see the savings in this I will be glad to buy him a calculator.

Premier Double D 's government avoids TCC for meetings

When the Trade and Convention Centre opened years ago one of it's pluses, or so we were told, was the ability to be subdivided to take any sized convention, meeting or party. Seems that doesn't impress NDP Premier Darrell Dexter or his government minion's. There was a list published last week showing the top 15 meetings/conventions that the provincial government ran and none of them were at the TCC. Why not? It's not in use that much so it couldn't have been booked for all those nights and, seeing it belongs to the province it wouldn't have cost a cent. Seems NDP Premier Double D is bent on spreading the tax dollars around to the selected few, no different than the other two parties. Here, for those interested in a list of those meetings, who held them, where they were held and what the price tag per event was.

Bruce DeVenne

Lipstick on a pig award

This weeks winner is NDP Bill Estabrooks, He was on the air today with Rick Howe didn't stay around long enough to talk to any members of the public in fact he didn't even mention them in his factless speech. They talking to staff, to council everybody but us the people who will pay for this white elephant. He said its a give and take deal but did not mention that its our money that they are giving and taking. We were told that this would be an "open" deal but he then went onto say that he didn't want to discuss it in public. Remember this party was voted for because they were different. Can you see a difference? I cant. Here is a short article from local free lance writer Professor Stephen Kimber, It calls a spade a spade and equates what is going on to the Commonwealth Games fiasco. Speak up or you will pay up. E Mail Bill, The Premier and The mayor and tell them no you (who will pay for this half a billion deal) can't afford it!

Mayor Kelly kellyp@halifax.ca

NDP Honourable Bill Estabrooks Estabrooksenergyminister@gov.ns.ca

NDP Premier Darrell Dexter premier@gov.ns.ca

Urban Compass by Stephen Kimber

FROM METRO HALIFAX

June 25, 2010 3:50 a.m.


Last Friday, a group calling itself the Coalition to Save the View held a press conference to release its analysis of four reports on the financial viability of a new convention centre for downtown Halifax. Promoters want the province to ante up one-third of its $300-million cost.

You may recall that when those vital-to-understanding-the-business-case reports were first released last winter — following a freedom of information request from (let the record show) the coalition rather than any media outlet — they were so heavily censored as to be unintelligible.

At the end of April, under orders from provincial Infrastructure Minister Bill Estabrooks, the reports were finally released, almost in full.

Initial media accounts claimed the reports supported the convention centre. While technically true, such conclusions, the coalition countered, “can only have resulted from a very superficial reading of the reports.” The coalition’s documentation includes four, small-type pages filled with quotations from the reports, each raising doubts about the case for the convention centre.

Between caveats — one report concedes it was prepared “without the benefit of any primary research” — and quietly acknowledged facts — a “huge supply of underutilized facilities in the U.S.” is forcing convention marketers to deep discount or eliminate rental rates entirely in order to attract ever fewer conventions — the coalition argues the reports don’t actually make the upbeat case they claim to.

The coalition’s own analysis indicates it will cost governments far more to cover the interest on borrowing funds to build the centre than it will recover in additional tax revenues.

“There’s no business case,” the coalition concludes.

Rather than responding to the substance of those arguments, Halifax Herald business columnist Roger Taylor began his day-after-the-press-conference column this way: “It must be difficult for a group calling itself the Coalition to Save the View to argue that its opposition to a new convention centre in Halifax is anything other than an attempt to prevent high-rises from being built in the downtown.”

Huh?

Taylor coupled his swipe at the coalition’s motives — he didn’t mention that one key report in favour of a new convention centre was written by the executive director of Convention Centres of Canada, a convention industry-promoting agency — with a no-numbers, no-analysis attack on its conclusions. “The coalition’s effort to fight the project on economic grounds,” he wrote, “fell short.”

Of what exactly?

The convention centre is beginning to sound like the Commonwealth Games all over again. With promoters and the puff press urging us to drink the Kool-Aid — without wanting to tell us what’s really in it.

– Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of Kings College, is the author of eight books.

Bruce DeVenne