Supportive Housing Operators Not Decided
The provincial government has now said the operators for the supportive housing projects in Nanaimo will not be announced until early December.
City council had repeatedly said the decision would be known by the end of this week. This is yet another example of the reasons residents distrust what city council has said about this program. Apparently they chose the Uplands site in Oct. 2010 but it was not announced until Sept. 2011 which makes you wonder who and how this program is being run.
It means another month of uncertainty for the Uplands residents in spite of Councilor Unger's urging to wait and see who the residents of the Uplands site will be, claiming it could be occupied by people other than drug and alcohol addicts.
Conflicting statements from Mayor Ruttan and MLA Ron Cantelon about whether funding for the entire project is in jeopardy don't make it any easier deciding who you can believe.
As an observer who supports the housing strategy, but does not support the way the city and province have administered the project it seems to me it could be a candidate for the Gong Show, if it were still on the air.
In the first few months of 2008 there were at least three studies (I imagine costly) which outlined the Nanaimo homeless plan. In November of 2008 the MOU was signed with the government of the day which included a timetable to implement the program outlined in those nice studies done earlier in the year. The MOU states that the date for completion of the buildings was to be November of 2010 ... that was last year already. As it stands one building is done on 10th Street, and one is partly underway on Wesley Street and one is moved to the back of the bus, on Bowen Road, but neither the city nor the province can tell you three years after signing the MOU who will be running the facilities.
Yet, this same group comes to the public, after clearly ignoring the plans outlined in their own Action Plan and keep expecting local residents to have confidence in how they will administer the program?
I repeat .......... the Gong Show!
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