The white elephants of previous KCDC Mayor Rowan and her council pale into insignificance compared with the Casa Poporului of the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, who was executed in 1989.

Now called the Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului) this massive complex, located on Dealul Arsenalului in central Bucharest, is the second largest administrative building in the world, after The Pentagon in the U.S.: 84 metres high, an area of 365,000 square metres, 1,100 rooms, and a volume of 2,550,000 cubic metres. It is also the third biggest building in the world (after the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, Mexico.)  A total 7 square kilometres of the old centre of Bucharest was cleared to make room for it.  It is said that in the communist years, a third of the state budget was spent on it.

Unsurprisingly, Ceaușescu started a reconstruction plan of Bucharest, with the People’s House the centrepiece of it, as a replica of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

Perhaps though, Mayor Church will expect a big bronze statue of himself outside the KCDC building when he leaves office?