FEATURED HEADLINE
The City of Kelowna has been taking in more property tax money every year for the last 5 years while the big construction projects it runs keep costing far more than the first numbers staff gave council. A pedestrian overpass on Bertram Street was first estimated around $5 million and finished at $12.1 million. The Clement Crosstown Connector road project jumped by more than $76 million and is now budgeted at $210 million. Airport terminal expansion phase 2 went from about $71 million to $138 million. The MNP Place recreation expansion roughly doubled. A water transmission line from Poplar Point to Dilworth went from roughly $45 million to $81 million. The whole 10-year capital plan the city uses to list these jobs has grown by hundreds of millions of dollars in recent updates, with the latest version sitting near $3 billion. These are not tiny adjustments. They are large, repeated jumps on different kinds of work over several years. The early estimates that went to council were simply too low. They did not build in enough money for how much construction prices rise over time, how long projects actually take, higher labour costs, or normal market risks. When the real bills arrived years later, taxpayers and ratepayers had to cover the difference through taxes, reserves, development charges, grants, or borrowing.
Doug Gilchrist is the City Manager. He is the top staff person who runs the administration that creates those estimates, watches the projects, and brings the numbers to council. His pay has risen sharply in recent years, by roughly 55%, and is now around $400,000 a year with his paid expenses. While that salary climbed, the same pattern of low early estimates and big later overruns continued. The city’s own value-for-money audit on the Bertram overpass looked at the jump from the original figure to the final $12.1 million and found internal problems with project management, monitoring, and how early contractor information was used, not just outside events like inflation or supply issues. Council approved the original low numbers and later approved the much higher ones. That means the City Manager and the senior staff who work under him own the process that produced the bad starting figures and the weak tracking that followed. Calling the repeated failure to get basic multi-year costs right incompetence is accurate. One bad estimate can be a mistake. The same kind of miss on bridge, road, airport, recreation, and water work is a pattern under the person responsible for the administration.
When members of the public file freedom of information requests to see the records on spending, land deals, project files, and decision-making, the city has responded with delays and high fees. Kelowna City clerk Laura Bentley waited until the last possible day to say they needed an extension, then shortly afterward demanded roughly $2,000 just to process the paperwork. They have now said that if a deposit is not paid immediately they will treat the entire request as abandoned. That is the opposite of open access to public records. It slows down or prices out anyone who wants to check the numbers on the overruns, the land transactions, or how decisions were made. A city collecting more tax revenue each year should not make basic accountability this hard or this expensive.
There are also open questions about real estate activity. Doug Gilchrist’s wife, Stephanie Gilchrist, works as a realtor with Coldwell Banker Horizon Realty in Kelowna. The city regularly buys and sells land, works with developers, and moves large property values through its capital projects and deals. When the top staff person’s spouse is actively selling real estate in the same city, and when requests for records that would show whether any city-related transactions, referrals, or related-party work have gone through her or connected parties are met with $2,000 fees, last-minute extensions, and threats to drop the file if money is not paid right away, people are right to want clear answers. No public document has shown a specific deal that put personal profit in the Gilchrist household, but the combination of large public land activity, a family member in local realty, rising executive pay, and resistance to releasing the records is the exact situation that requires full transparency instead of obstacles.
The plain picture is that more tax money is coming in, big projects keep costing far more than first estimated under the City Manager’s administration, his compensation has risen while those results stayed poor, and requests for the paperwork that would let the public see the details are being delayed and priced high with a threat to cancel them. That is not proper oversight. That is a City Manager and administration that have failed at basic cost control and are making it difficult for anyone to look closer at the spending, the estimates, the land deals, or the process. The public has every right to keep asking for the records until they are released and the numbers are explained in clear terms.
A competentCity Manager drawing top-tier public pay is supposed to deliver competent forecasting and clean delivery of the capital program, yet the repeated, multi-million-dollar gaps between early estimates and final costs show the opposite result. Ratepayers are effectively subsidizing an executive salary that has grown substantially while the core function of accurate multi-year project planning has not. When the person at the top of the administration continues to collect that compensation after the same estimating failures keep occurring, the message to the public is that poor performance carries no consequence for the individual in charge. That is not accountability. It is a reward structure that protects the office-holder and leaves everyone else to absorb the higher bills. This is what Kelowna gets for nearly $400,000 a year, this incompetence instead.
Doug also gets priority Mr. Entitlement police service. Certainly doesn’t seem like the general public gets these kinds of results when their stuff gets vandalized. Which there seems to be a lot of happening.
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