RDCK rejects Nelson's proposal and won’t be moving to the White Building
By Bill Metcalfe
The board of the Regional District of Central Kootenay (RDCK) has turned down, by a vote of 19-1, Nelson City Council’s proposal that it relocate to the downtown government building, otherwise known as the White Building.
The city’s proposal painted a rosy picture of how the move would put all three levels of government—regional, municipal, and provincial—under one roof, allowing the city and the RDCK to save money by sharing some aspects of space, equipment, and technology.
“We have an incredible opportunity at our doorstep,” said Mayor John Dooley in a January 21 news release, “not only for the RDCK staff and Directors, but for the public as well. There is a lot of cross-over between the three levels of government, so why not make it easier for the public, and all reside in the same building?”
But RDCK board chair John Kettle has a different view. “The RDCK building is paid for,” he told The Nelson Daily on Wednesday. “We don’t have to move and we never planned to. All we have to do is renovate our building to suit our employees.”
Kettle said the renovations and purchase of new furniture at its current office building at 202 Lakeside will cost up to $600,000, which the RDCK has saved in a reserve account.
When the RDCK announced last year that it was considering renovating its building to solve some space problems, the City of Nelson suggested that two floors of vacant space in the White Building might be the answer. The RDCK responded by requesting a proposal from the city, specifying that such a proposal would be given a business case analysis by a consultant.
The city’s proposal, which included space plans drawn by a consultant, summarized the financial case for the move as follows:
The RDCK will be able to buy into 310 Ward St. at a cost based on the City’s original purchase price. The RDCK’s cost will be $1,232,000; the current assessed value is $1,806,000 (this includes space for dedicated RDCK use as well as a 50/50 split in the shared spaces). To accommodate the relocation of the RDCK, the City of Nelson will purchase 202 Lakeside Drive for its assessed value of $1,728,000 subject to an inspection.
The difference between the City’s purchase price for 202 Lakeside and the RDCK’s purchase of space at 310 Wart St. creates a tenant improvement reserve of $496,000.
The tone of the 40-page proposal seemed to be inspired by an assumption that the move would be an obvious choice for the RDCK.
“There was a disconnect,” says Kettle. “There was a different level of expectation from the city.”
That disconnect may have been furthered by secrecy around the process. Discussions about the proposal at both the RDCK board and at city council tables have been in-camera (closed to the public and the media) and the proposal’s details were confidential until both bodies issued more-or-less simultaneous press releases this week containing starkly different interpretations of the situation.
Councillor Donna Macdonald, one of the main drivers of the city’s proposal and the city’s representative on the RDCK board, says the board turned it down without the promised business case analysis.
“I am disappointed that more time and effort was not made in reviewing our proposal,” she said in the city’s news release. “The City would not have invested such significant staff time and dollars into developing this proposal if we had known it would only receive a cursory review.”
The consulting company Omicron provided that “cursory” review for the RDCK and it can be found here beginning at page 100. Omicron’s Cameron Kemp, in his introduction to the review document, writes, “This review consists only of initial thoughts, comments, and questions.”
Some examples of the items in the city’s proposal that Omicron appeared dubious about include:
- The cost per square foot of tenant improvements,
- The costs of moving,
- Whether the public cares about having all government services in one location,
- Whether RDCK staff would want to split themselves between two floors rather than the single floor workplace they now have, and
- That the city proposes to buy the RDCK building on Lakeside at assessed rather than market value.
Those and other questions led RDCK’s Chief Operating Officer Brian Carruthers to advise the RDCK board that Omicron’s comments “suggest that the proposed space at 310 Ward St. is inferior to a renovated 202 Lakeside facility and that the risks and costs of the proposal may outweigh the proposed benefits.”
Kettle told The Nelson Daily that he intends to convene a meeting between his board and city council, and the senior managers of both, to sort out any misunderstandings.
