The City of Nanaimo has shut down its second attempt to use an alternative-approval process to borrow $48.5 million to pay for the first phase of major improvements to its aging public works facilities.
Council unanimously voted Monday in favour of a recommendation from chief administrative officer Dale Lindsay to cancel the AAP and its related bylaw.
Instead, staff will return to council with options on ways to pay for the first phase of the Nanaimo operations centre project. No date was set.
Cancellation of the AAP follows a complaint that forms for filing opposition to borrowing the money were not available as soon as the first notice of the approval process was published, as required under legislation.
A previous alternative-approval process late last year for the same project also had to be tossed out after an administrative error was discovered.
AAPs are held by local governments instead of a borrowing referendum, which is more expensive. A referendum needs a 50 per cent plus one vote to be successful. The alternative system requires at least 10 per cent of electors to sign a form opposing borrowing for it to fail.
Nanaimo lawyer Sandy Bartlett, who pointed out problems with the voting system to Nanaimo city hall, called the alternative process a “dinosaur” created in 1962.
The next borrowing process should be a referendum, he told council when it opened its meeting to the public.
It became clear in winter of last year that there were few people who knew about it, Bartlett said. “The process does not lend itself to providing effective notice to the population.”
The only way for the public to be fully informed would have been to send notices through the mail, but that did not happen, he said.
Meanwhile, the Capital Regional District and the Grumpy Taxpayers of Greater Victoria are squaring off over whether proper notification procedure was followed during the recent alternative-approval process around borrowing $85 million to create more affordable housing.
A total of 1,859 electoral response forms were submitted — well below the 10 per cent level of 33,191 required for the process to fail.
The CRD’s board is scheduled to receive the results of the alternative process, which ended Feb. 5, on Wednesday and to vote on final reading of the bylaw that would authorize borrowing.
District staff insist that proper procedures were followed under the CRD’s bylaw and provincial rules. The Grumpy Taxpayers group disagrees.
The CRD called on the Grumpy Taxpayers to withdraw its news release questioning the validity of the alternative process, but the group has refused to do so.
Stan Bartlett of the Grumpy Taxpayers urged the district to hold a borrowing referendum to gauge the public’s willingness to borrow the money.
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