Dear Editor:
Re: Burnaby’s surprise $100-million surplus.
Put in the simplest terms, that amounts to almost a quarter of the year’s operating cost for the city, or just under half of a year’s property tax revenue. Or put another way, the city planned for a surplus half that size and ended up with one three times the size of surplus they planned. Whichever way you slice it, that’s a lot of money out of my pocket and yours.
So they put it away for a rainy day – how prudent! Surprises of that magnitude are all very nice when they are positive like this, but in my view it looks like really bad management. Are they really that ignorant about their revenues and expenses?
And what next: are they working on a fully planned economy, so we won’t have the problem of figuring out how to spend any of our hard-earned funds?
Perhaps our city fathers have kept their heads in the sand (at the municipal golf courses, where the golfing is free), and have not noticed the historic success of other planned economies - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea being a current example.
We certainly seem to be headed down a parallel path – with a two-tier society just like the comrades. Welcome to the People’s Republic of Burnaby!
Thomas Hasek, Burnaby
