Exhibit #1: Found in The Province News, September 29, 2014 (edited) — Part 1[1] Various Vancouver city hall functionaries attended a celebration dinner a couple of weeks back to congratulate themselves on their stewardship and final sale of the Olympic Village. No one should be celebrating the Olympic Village financial disaster and certainly not the Vision crowd who created many, if not most, of the problems and the financial losses. A complete description of how this Olympic Village financial fiasco occurred in the first place is contained in my report to the community, which was published by the Vancouver Sun on Oct. 16, 2010. My investigations at that time were made as a result of a direct request by <JP>,[2] chairman of the Olympic Games, and I was given complete access to all the files concerning the project. To begin with, the project got off to a significantly delayed start during the period when Vision/COPE controlled city hall in 2002 to 2005. Then the city saddled the developer with a contaminated site that took months to clean up, following which they demanded every possible change they could dream up to the project's design. The serious delays, misjudgments and changes ended up costing the project and, ultimately, Vancouver taxpayers well over $100 million because at the end of the day Vancouver only got $70 million of the $170 million still owed on the original sale of the city-owned land.
The upfront foul-ups were bad enough, but the final financial coup de grâce came from Mayor <GR>, whose propaganda team decided that the key way to win the Vancouver civic election of 2008 was to blame the Olympic Village financial mess entirely on their political opposition. This tactic was a distortion of the facts but it made for very effective politics. Unfortunately for Vancouver taxpayers, <GR>'s strategy included a crushing debasement and slagging of the project itself. The mayor called the project a "train wreck" and a multitude of other negative adjectives that put a massive black-death stigmatization on the remaining assets. Anyone would realize that these dangerous comments, made at every political opportunity, would drive down both the value of the assets and the ultimate recovery for taxpayers. But <GR> and his political strategists only cared about being elected so the ultimate suffering of taxpayers did not matter.
1. As reported by &tl;RM>, a developer, former director of the Urban Development Institute and a former vice president of the Non-Partisan Association.
2. Full names have been replace to avoid embarrassment.
|
Introduction
