It is clear from Shelley Patterson’s letter (All so much fun) that she fails to understand that the Heat are not the issue, merely evidence of city hall’s financial mismanagement and flawed priorities.
I really don’t care enough about the Heat as an organization to be either negative or positive about them. On the other hand, I am intensely negative about city council using taxpayer dollars to pay yearly, multi-million dollar subsidies to the Heat.
So it is with the Abbotsford Entertainment and Sports Complex building. I am neither positive nor negative about the building itself.
Carelessness and arrogance cost the taxpayers of Abbotsford millions of dollars from provincial or federal government funding.
When citizens dared to suggest that council needed to line up funding from senior levels of government before plans were finalized, council told the citizens to run along and let those who “knew what they were doing” handle the matter.
City council does not have $50,000 to build a handicapped accessible playground; it does not have money to make city sidewalks navigable to citizens in wheelchairs so they do not have to wheel along on the roads of Abbotsford; it does not have the money to paint lines on the roads that would be visible in the rain or do other road work needed to make driving, walking and cycling safer in Abbotsford.
But when it comes to ego projects, the city has millions of dollars a year to squander to subsidize the millions of dollars the Heat lose, and millions more to subsidize the losses of operating the AESC for the Heat.
James W. Breckenridge
