By Cecilia Nasmith/Northumberland 89.7 FM/Today’s Northumberland
Even though Northumberland County councillors try to steward reserves carefully, they voted at this week’s meeting to dig into the treasury for money to cover the latest $l6,596,025 overrun on the Golden Plough Lodge/Northumberland County Archives and Museum project.
Its current budget is $144-million, up roughly $30-million from what was originally budgeted, and the June 24 opening next year is more than a year later than originally planned. Begun during the pandemic, it has been plagued with its share of delays and cost overruns.
In such cases, however, reserves aren’t always a first resort. As Chief Administrative Officer Jennifer Moore pointed out, the idea of reserves is rainy-day money. This money has to be there in case of a rainy day and, in the meantime, it is earning interest.
Councillor Scott Jibb stressed the importance of where that money came from.
“That money didn’t materialize on a tree in the back yard. It came from taxpayers at some point in time,” Jibb pointed out.
“We don’t remove it, we don’t withdraw it, we don’t have to replace it. It was taxpayers’ money, and it will always be taxpayers’ money from some levy, past, present or future.”
Councillor Mandy Martin had declared herself against the concept of a Joint Operations Base at this time, for which $6.5-million had been set aside in the reserves in order to purchase land for the site. Martin made the motion to use that to pay down the cost overrun.
A second motion was soon made to take another $10,095,025 and pay it down entirely. This motion was made with Director of Finance Matthew Nitsch’s announcement in mind that Infrastructure Ontario allows municipalities to apply for debentures retroactively – so that option is there in the future, if council decides to take advantage of it.
Director of Engineering Denise Marshall noted that previous councils decided that, in this project, “we should go above what’s required by the Ministry.”
And in any case, Warden Brian Ostrander added, it was made clear that rebuilding the Golden Plough Lodge was not optional.
“We were required to have one, and we were required to rebuild it. No one yelled, ‘Yeehaw, let us build a new building,’” Ostrander said.
Councillor Lucas Cleveland said that the whole process of rebuilding the Golden Plough Lodge, from start to finish, should be looked at by a third party.
“This is a six-, seven-year project over several staff members and council members,” Cleveland pointed out.
“How is it we are years building? How is it over budget? How can we truly learn what we can do better?”
“When all is said and done, it could be a good idea to look back and say how could we have done better, where we started, where we got to, what happened in between,” the warden agreed.
“I think staff would recommend that feedback, because there’s a lot of stakeholders involved, and I think we would be happy to be part of that,” Chief Administrative Officer Jennifer Moore said.
“However, we’re trying to get it across the finish line. At the full conclusion of the project, not to jeopardize when things get across the finish line at this point.”
