LVEC "Business Plan" - the Emperor has no clothes

[Valley]

Well the LVEC "Business Plan" has been released. It has more financial holes than the proverbial piece of swiss cheese!

As we continue to pour millions of litres of raw sewage into Lake Ontario we seem to have no solutions to this continuing environmental problem. But the LVEC seems to have a bottomless pit of funds - $40 million + and counting. If the LVEC is built, I hope its corporate supporters enjoy the raw sewage as it rolls by this folly on the water.

:mad:

[Emerald]

I think the comments about sewage are right on and concerns such as this will have to be addressed. You have to admit though that the business plan was very professionally presented and tried to anticipate some of the concerns about conflicting calls on the public purse.

I think it is time for the anti-sale of the M centre people to come forward with a plan to make this site a jewel rather than a dumping ground. Multi-pad or not, the site could still be a mess. Lets have a design for a good looking park that isn't fenced like a prison.

[Valley]

As we see more analysis of the LVEC plan, the questionable assumptions and grand leaps of faith become more readily apparent:

- A traffic consultant who cannot tell the difference between a straight line and the actual walking distances pedestrians will have to travel

- A business plan that omits the actual cost of acquiring and remediating the land required for the LVEC

- The exclusion of the servicing and road costs needed to properly access the site through a brand new extension of Wellington Street .

With a total building and related infrastructure (land, roads, servicing) costs of almost $50 million, and a costly subisdized 'P3' financing model (see below for more on the P3), when will this sad folly end?

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Private-public partnerships flawed: Health watchdog

Carol Mulligan CP April 30, 2005

SUDBURY, Ont. -- The head of a health-care watchdog group is urging the provincial government not to be misled by offers from private companies to build new hospitals.

The Ontario Health Coalition and the Canadian Union of Public Employees held a joint news conference Friday in Sudbury to sound the alarm about how new hospitals in North Bay and Sault Ste. Marie may be financed.

The province says they'll be paid for with an "innovative funding model," but the OHC and CUPE argue that may be doublespeak for private-public partnerships that could mean private hospitals in which jobs, and local control, are lost, says the OHC's Natalie Mehra.

Private-public hospitals, such as the ones being built in Brampton and Ottawa, are the result of deals that give developers control of lands on which the hospitals stand, allow them to hire their own managers and let them privatize and "bundle" services, said Mehra.

"Its fairly obvious why we're concerned," she said.

People touting the benefits of private-public hospital partnerships point to delays and cost overruns involved in consolidating hospital services in Sudbury and Thunder Bay as places private industry could do a better job, said Mehra.

"As if the privatization of hospitals would be a panacea to stop big construction projects from cost overruns and being late."

The OHC has released a report called 100 P3s -- Failed, Flawed and Abandoned, which cites cost overruns, legal disputes, bankruptcies and shoddy disasters in private-public partnerships in Canada and abroad.

"They're very, very damaging to the public health system," said Mehra.

The drive of corporations involved in hospital projects is to create a two-tier health-care system they can benefit from, and that poses a "significant threat to medicare," she said.

Michael Hurley, president of CUPE's Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said the province hasn't been forthcoming about exactly how it plans to fund construction of the North Bay and Sault hospitals.

"It should be open and transparent," he said.

Premier Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals promised during the election campaign to cancel private-public partnership deals struck by the former Progressive Conservative government in Brampton and Ottawa, but they've reneged on that promise, Hurley said.

If the province's funding model for North Bay turns out to be a private-public partnership, CUPE will conduct a public referendum to make people aware of the disadvantages of such a partnership.

Private-public hospitals result in fewer beds, fewer staff, "shoddy construction and cost overruns," said Hurley, as private companies aim to earn profits of 17 to 25 per cent a year.

Ontario hospitals have combined operating budgets $10 billion a year, so that would mean $2.5 billion of that would be profit, under that formula.

Under the private-public deals, the province wouldn't contribute any money for new hospital construction.

Seventy per cent would come from private corporations and communities would continue to be required to raise 30 per cent.

But, instead of investing in a hospital they own, local money would fund facilities owned privately, said Hurley.