You can't win for losing
Following up on the County leasing situation here one cannot help that the County Boss can't win for losing. By attracting non-profit agencies into his brand new empire Bill Pyatt has contributed to the loss of commercial rent in the Fleming building by offering discount rents. Is this what we are after - government putting the boots to private enterprise? If we own the building, as pointed out in a previous post, why are we charging rent at all to our own departments and not charging commercial rates to the others? The idea was to save taxpayers money not increasing inter-departmental chargebacks to inflate a budget that taxpayers have to pay. In addition we now find that the County will do this at the expense of one of the biggest landlords in Cobourg - LinMac.
2 comments:
Oh, but United Way is just looking out for its donors by sourcing out the cheapest rent. Let's also not forget that United Way is in "partnership" with the County in its foodbank division, which will be paying rent in the same building too.
Perhaps before we turn on poor old Pyatt, we should consider who is relly pulling the strings here? Never mind, it is "the Better Way" after all.
One can think of it this way too - by housing only "publicly" funded (by way of public donations), groups, the County gets to recover additional funds from the public, including non-taxpayers, without actually doing so through wider or deeper direct taxation. It doesn't necessarily mean less taxation for other things, but it does mean more "play money" for the bureaucrati and their political bosses. It also means fewer tenant demands that cost extra and may be non-recoverable.
Never mind the private sector, it will recover quite nicely from the temporary loss. After all, I'm not convinced that they depend on unpredictable government hand-holding to survive in the business world, (but it's a bonus while you can get some).
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