This Trading Thoughts column was going to commend the city for completing the three years of negotiations to get the Canadian Tire project moving.
The new development on the eastern side of the Exhibition grounds will offer a shopping hub with Canadian Tire, Mark’s Work Wearhouse and Forzani’s stores attracting customers and leaving outlets for other businesses to occupy.
Then the rest of the story unfolded when Coun. Brian Swanson asked some pertinent questions at the Dec. 16 council meeting.
The math on this deal is quite simple.
The city will get paid $3.1 million for 11.95 acres of land. After the city spends $2.4 million compensating the Exhibition for loss of the lease, building sewer, water, lights and installing power and phone services the city stands to make a $619,000 profit.
Sounds great until we taxpayers realize the city had a better deal three years ago.
Under that agreement the city would have been paid $3.78 million and would have spent $2 million on servicing the property and compensating the Exhibition.
Somewhere along the way the city and our council lost just over $1 million profit on the deal. In three years the city land price went from $316,800 an acre to $265,000. How and why will never be answered by this secretive fraternity.
When Swanson questioned administration about the loss in profit the city manager retorted this happened before his watch.
Just what did that response mean: that he never read the original deal closely? Or was this council so desperate for new development that it scrapped the $1 million profit to get a sale?
Remember this is the council that tried to convince voters that a $100 million pea processing plant was coming, even though council knew the main investor was under investigation for fraud and had a remote chance of raising the funds to build the project.
The mayor went so far as to convince the publisher of the Moose Jaw Times-Herald to quash a story about the fraud investigation.
At the Dec. 16 meeting Mayor Fraser Tolmie defended the deal, saying it was good for Moose Jaw.
The delay, he said, came from bureaucracy, miscommunication with the Exhibition and delays in Saskatchewan Environment approval to build on former burrowing owl nesting grounds.
Saskatchewan Environment cleared the site for development when Garry McKay was still city manager. McKay was terminated in 2013 — three years before the first Canadian Tire deal.
The miscommunication with the Exhibition involved middle of the night delivery of city documents to the Exhibition office and refusal to take phone calls from the Exhibition lawyer.
It is worth noting once the city completes the $2 million service project, a sod turning can be arranged just before the civic election to make council look like awesome builders.
But at a $1 million cost to the taxpayers. That is pretty expensive campaign publicity.
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Happy New Year to all from our household! May the New Year bring wiser decisions.
Ron Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
