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Originally Posted by Sliver
Meh, no offense to anybody in particular, but it's not exactly CP's intellectual A team arguing against the City here
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You sure you're the right guy to be making that call?
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Originally Posted by Sliver
If you look at the facts honestly and objectively, the only conclusion you can come to is the City handled themselves well
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It's not illegal so therefore the city did nothing wrong? They saved us good citizens millions of dollars? That kind of seems like the consensus.
Danielle Smith read the letter the City of Calgary wrote to tenants in 2012 today. This quote from it is pretty telling....
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Midfield Park will not close until the construction of the new East Hills Estates Park has been completed...registered Midfield tenants will be entitled to a relocation allowance....all rights to the relocation allowance will be transferable to future purchasers of mobile homes in Midfield"
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This is the letter that people took to banks to get financing. This is the reason some people were able to obtain mortgages. The city said "yes, by all means continue buying trailers. We will pay to have them moved to a new park". So that's what people did from 2012-2014.
There is no question that the City knew they had a responsibility to accommodate these people. That's why they committed to doing so in the first place. And there's no doubt they've failed in their fiduciary duty to citizens by reneging on their commitment.
If you have one asset to sell and you do something like this, then fine. You win. Take your money and run. But I'm sure somewhere down the road someone is going to look at this and ask for something in the way of a risk premium when doing business with the city. I sure would. If your commitments mean nothing I'll be covering my interest and then some.
Anyway, the city plans on spending close to 4 million and three years paying people and have achieved nothing but a massive problem. Just looking at the assessed values of these places, 35k per unit seems like a pretty accurate average price...maybe even a bit high. So for 6.5 million, they could have come very close to covering off people's equity. After that is accomplished I could care less if people miss their ancestral village. You're equity whole...life goes on.
An extra 2-3 million bucks to fix this is peanuts. 4-5 million more even is sfa. It's the interest on the change this project would have earned had they done it ten years ago. It's a million stupid things we've bought in the last ten years. It's literally nothing. What it is though, is credibility.
A letter from the City of Calgary should mean more that the paper it's printed on. And whoever counts the beans on these projects should definitely go back to abacus school. I'd trade ten years of developed property taxes on this land for 3-5 million bucks any day.
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In this case, the City owns the park, and the City also is responsible for the infrastructure. That infrastructure, in this case, ACTUALLY RUNS UNDERNEATH STRUCTURES. Do you understand that difference? Ripping up a road is different than ripping through the livingroom of a house. The City doesn't own Inglewood. Or Bowness.
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I know the city didn't build the park. But I'm pretty sure they approved its design and development plan. I'm also pretty sure people didn't just start dropping trailers around willy nilly. It's kind of puzzling to say we built an entire city properly except this place. And by the way it's on you.