by Geoffrey Churchman

In November 2022 the council vote was 6-5 to let this abandonment motion lie on the table while staff produced another report on it. If those 6 were hoping for another endorsement and recommendation to proceed with it, they were mistaken: the report recommended its abandonment.

In an additional meeting today the motion from Cr Liz Koh from last November was resurrected — with a small amount of updating — and was passed unanimously.

Thus ends over 3 years of heated debate over this vanity project of the previous mayor who used every form of manipulation he could think of to achieve it. But the councilors today all clearly accepted that the magnitude of the blown-out budget was now simply unacceptable to Ratepayers.

The report states that the council has spent $1.55 million on it, which of course is a write-off. There have been many other examples of wasted expenditure by KCDC since 2007 but this is one of the worst.

Those who may like a fuller report of the meeting are referred to this one on the KC News website

Mayor Holborow thanked the highly-paid staff for doing their jobs, as she always does, but it would have been nice for her to have acknowledged the considerable unpaid time and work that was put into submissions by those objecting to the project, and the significant stress and anguish it caused them over a protracted time.