Sometimes, politicians just have to suck it up and sign the cheque to move the city forward

WEDNESDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — Being careful with taxpayers’ money is good, but there’s also a saying that there can be too much of a good thing.

Lately, Coun. Nelly Dever has taken on the role of tight-fisted protector of the taxpayers’ dollar. Tuesday afternoon, she read from a prepared speech telling council it was “rushing in” on buying the Kamloops Daily News building, saying the $4.8 million price tag was “a lot of money for City taxpayers to cough up.”

Dever was alone in voting against the purchase of the property, which will be used to provide public parking and revenue until it’s developed with a yet-to-be determined civic facility.

There were immediate temptations (as will often be the case over the next few months as incumbents become intent on honing their reputations as careful stewards of public money) to mention it’s an election year, but there’s a trend here.

A few weeks ago, it was Dever who questioned the need for a new performing arts centre, even though it’s been identified for years as the next important civic amenity. It’s in the city’s official strategic plan.

And just a couple of weeks ago, she seemed poised to question a proposal by staff to provide Wi-Fi services in public facilities, wanting to know why it wasn’t included in the supplementary budget for discussion. “We’re not asking for any money,” she was told, a fact that was, no doubt, included in council’s background information.

When she ran in the 2011 election, her main platform plank was beautification of the city’s gateway entrances. It was an expensive promise, bound to run into many millions of dollars, though she didn’t talk about cost.

When council followed through and got an estimate on renovating just a single gateway — the all-important route from the airport into town — it came in at a whopping $24 million.

“This is not what we want,” she decided.

Other council members were also understandably reluctant to spend that kind of money on a corridor so, instead, they struck a committee. The City’s upgrade to the eastern gateway a decade ago should have provided a clue as to the cost of fixing up gateways. That project involved mostly landscaping, without any reconstruction, yet it was still expensive.

Spending public money is often politically risky. There’s a process for it — if the City doesn’t have the necessary funds in the bank, it has to borrow, and large loans are subject to what’s commonly called a counter petition. If the threshold is reached, as it was in the case of the Riverside Park parkade, council has a choice of putting it to a referendum or shelving the project.

Council also has the option of going straight to a referendum, as was done with the Tournament Capital facilities.

Maybe memories of the parked fiasco linger, as Dever made sure to point out, but that project was simply in the wrong place. For that reason, it was a bad project. You wouldn’t have to go far to find someone who thinks a $24-million gateway reno is a bad project, either.

And yet, Dever was a leader in pushing for big pay increases for council.

Some projects are worth supporting. The performing arts centre is one. So is a parkade, in the right location. The purchase of the Daily News building opens up options either as a site for the performing arts centre or the much-needed and long-overdue downtown parkade.

As Dever said when she was advocating for council pay hikes, politicians sometimes have to “suck it up.” That includes investing in the future of the community. Otherwise, people start wondering what it is, exactly, that you do stand for.