Friday, January 29, 2016

Old City Hall Annex - Assessed for $2.00

How Does BC Assessment Work?

You may recall the old city hall annex was given to a local company for $2.00 a few years ago. The company I believe was called Tectonica, owned by Mr. Darren Moss. The reason for the property give away was due to a condition of sale put on the property that required seismic upgrades.

When the sale to Tectonica was announced in Dec. 2012, it was said the company had two years to either demolish the building or do the seismic upgrades or the property would revert to the city. At that time one of the terms in the agreement called for the city to pay Tectonica $40,000 which was said to offset taxes on the property.

Clearly, two years have elapsed since this agreement was reached and clearly the property still stands and is clearly not upgraded. So, I presume the city is in the process of taking possession of this taxpayer asset and I will advise what information is forthcoming from city hall.

In the meantime, I have to wonder why BC Assessment thinks this property only has a $2 value for the purpose of assessment given that another property of similar size at 450 Franklyn Street has an assessed value of $655,000.00. One might be forgiven for questioning just what kind of voodoo, BC Assessment uses when it comes to evaluating properties.

It is noteworthy that I inquired of Mr. Clemens last year when I noticed the property was also assessed for $2 thinking the city might have an interest in seeing the property was properly taxed. Apparently no action was taken and obviously there is no incentive for Mr. Moss to challenge the property assessment, even though he was paid $40,000 to offset the taxes.

City Hall Annexes, just another one of those city hall stories that stinks to high heaven.


allvoices

4 comments:

  1. I am sure someone has to be enquiring to B.C. Assessment about this mistake!

    And someone is talking to the City of Nanaimo about this very "suspicious" undertaking. It does stink of something quite peculiar, to say the least.

    ReplyDelete
  2. the $2.00 would be based on the actual sale price..that is what they would see and why use a different building for comparison.
    I believe this deal was a colosal farce. The would have been further ahead to just level the property and sell it for the land value, if, in fact the instability of the building was so bad as to require these extensive improvements...It would be interesting to see what the land value would be.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sherry M, do you have any proof that it would have cost less to demolish and clear the site than they would have made selling the land? Your plan sounds like it would have resulted in an ugly empty lot for who knows how long. Not the kind of sight I want to see there!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Had city hall not put a condition of sale requiring any purchaser to do seismic improvements (beyond what the building code would require), that property could have been sold for considerably more than $2.

    ReplyDelete

Your comment will appear after moderation before publishing,

Thank you for your comments.Any comment that could be considered slanderous or includes unacceptable language will be removed.

Thank you for participating and making your opinions known.

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.