City Hall Overstepping Mandate??

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Superseding Building Code Requirements

Cost Taxpayers $4,000,000.00 +

A common lament at city hall is the fact that senior levels of government keep 'downloading' responsibility without supplying the funds to pay for it. I have yet to hear in any great detail, an example of such a download, but that is for another day.

The current building code, which is a document approved by senior levels of government does NOT require seismic upgrading of a building unless there is a change in intended use. This was the reason the theatre on Victoria Road did not require any seismic upgrading as going from being used as a church to a theatre did not change the buildings use.

A seismic study was done on the old city annex and the engineer decided there was the risk of damage in a seismic event. This study however, did not define said event or offer any probability estimates of this actually happening. For people spending their own money, this could have been what some would call a less than precise way of deciding to demolish a building. It occurs to me, that city staff could have simply latched onto this statement to justify ending up with a shiny new office, with shiny new furniture which had been the 'end game' all along. There's that skeptical Jim thinking again.

The recent seismic assessments done on the Colliery Dam points to the vast range of probabilities these seismic events will ever occur. For example studies of the possibility of an event that would topple the dams was claimed as high as 40% in 50 years (not supported by an engineer) to as low as 1.6% in 50 years. At one point the integrity of the dams was measured against an event with a 1:10,000 years chance of happening! The point? If you play with numbers and apply enough 'what if's' you can sooner or later conclude that every structure on the face of the earth 'could' fail in a seismic event.

Can Nanaimo AFFORD To Supersede The Building Code?

Does Nanaimo NEED To Supersede The Building Code?

What makes Nanaimo taxpayers think that the brain trust at city hall, and on city council should be making public policy about such things as to how to interpret risk and apply them to the building code. For heaven's sake, every time you turn around, city hall experts are commissioning another study to tell them what to do.

It would seem more than logical to me, for the city hall staff, to consult the National Building Code and apply the rules which are applied in that book which have been put together by folks with far more expertise than is resident at our city hall.

To make arbitrary decisions about how you are going to apply the building code defies logic and will simply result in what will be unsustainable tax increases for years to come.

City Hall Annex A Perfect Example

By insisting that a new purchaser abide by conditions which the National Building Code does not apply, the city hall brain trust threw away a $4,000,000.00 building! Remember the engineers report said the building could be damaged in a seismic event. So can every building in Nanaimo! That report was far from conclusive and leaves more questions unanswered than answered. Not the least of which would be 'what is the probability of the worst case scenario?'.

City Staff has already started to put council in the corner of not paying attention to public safety, by commissioning seismic studies of civic buildings, which I expect will be no more complete than the study used to convince everyone staff needed a shiny new building.

City Hall can chuck and chew all they want about how they have to keep raising taxes because of decisions made by senior government, but they lose all credibility when they set about superseding decisions already made by those levels of senior government.