To the editor:
It seems the fad for governments is to sell off their public services and institutions to the private sector and then subsidize the private sector on free market type capital projects. Since roads and city properties are constantly being maintained, why do we have the private sector perform these tasks? Is this really the less expensive way to go? Why are we allowing the private sector to take over essential services such electrical power and then publicly subsidizing them (ie: wind farms) to profit off of us?
Now the city is considering selling the municipally owned golf courses and closing the conservatory. The issue we should be addressing is not how much something costs, but rather why it costs so much? Was there not a time that our municipally run golf courses were self-sustaining? Why does the conservatory have such a high operating cost? Was this an issue, many years ago?
Is this a desperate attempt by the city to acquire additional funds for other projects? We’ve already seen this when they took the money originally intended for the two additional senior homes and put it into the waterfront. Is history repeating itself? The solution here isn’t to simply cut services, but rather to find out why these institutions are being mismanaged. I call on city council to find these cost inefficiencies, rather than except the status quo offered by city administration.
Andy Wolff,
Thunder Bay
