{"id":16533,"date":"2017-02-15T17:30:57","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T22:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=16533"},"modified":"2017-02-22T17:13:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T22:13:45","slug":"comprehensive-report-will-address-joc-budget-issues-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/comprehensive-report-will-address-joc-budget-issues-mayor\/","title":{"rendered":"“Comprehensive report” will address JOC budget issues: Mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

A comprehensive report from Aurora\u2019s CAO will address lingering concerns over the final costs of the Town\u2019s new Joint Operations Centre, according to Mayor Geoff Dawe.
\nThe Mayor made his comments in his annual interview with The Auroran ahead of his yearly address to the Aurora Chamber of Commerce on February 15.
\nIn his interview (See Page 7 of this week’s Auroran), Mayor Dawe cited two items as particular hallmarks of the last 12 months of Council, one he said, was a positive and one which might be seen in a slightly less positive light.
\nThe first, he said, was the settlement reached in the redevelopment of the former Highland Gate golf course.
\n\u201cIt is not a popular decision in Town, but I highlight it because of what we did not go through, which is a long, messy hearing that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for probably no benefit to the Town,\u201d said Mayor Dawe. \u201cI understand it was not a popular decision, but the reality is that all of us (Council), because we\u2019re elected at large, are required to make decisions that benefit the entire Town.
\n\u201cWould it benefit the entire Town to spend upwards of $1 million that probably would not get what most people wanted? It is not one of those really popular decisions, but it is part of what we have to do.\u201d
\nA more positive item, he said, was the completion of Aurora\u2019s new Joint Operations Centre (JOC) at the head of Industrial Parkway. Completed last year as the combined new home of the Departments of Parks and Public Works, it is a state-of-the art building that boasts many environmentally friendly features and space to address the needs of a growing municipality.
\nThe JOC, however, has not been without its fair share of controversy.
\nSince January, the final budget for the facility has been under the increased scrutiny of Council as some members have questioned just what the final costs of the building are.
\nIn a recent blog post, Councillor Tom Mrakas reiterated some of his comments made around the Council table last month.
\n\u201cOnce again, Council was asked to review new budget numbers and added capital items for the project,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI can\u2019t help but notice that costs keep being added after the project is said to have been completed. I have made the point repeatedly that capital projects cannot continue to be managed in this fashion. Getting one price and thinking that\u2019s it, but then finding out afterwards that there are many other items that are added in after the fact that add to the overall costs of a facility pretty substantially. Certainly in the case of the JOC where these \u2018added costs\u2019 are now close to a million dollars, I believe the Financial Task Force who monitor and examine all the financial and budgetary aspects related to the delivery of this project should provide an explanation as to why so many components were removed to meet the budget targets.\u201d
\nTo address these concerns, Mayor Dawe said CAO Doug Nadorozny is preparing a \u201cvery comprehensive report\u201d on the matter, but said \u201ceverything has come before Council up to this point. There shouldn\u2019t be any surprises.\u201d
\nNevertheless, a different approach would have been taken to the project in hindsight, he said.
\n\u201cAs soon as we ran into a soils issue, which was a big challenge, although we still ended up with a land cost that would have been less if it were at the 404, we should have highlighted that at that point and re-looked at the budget to say we have had this increase, we\u2019re going to run into our contingency, this is not a good way to use our contingency, and at least have had the discussion back then on if we should increase our budget by x-amount,\u201d said Mayor Dawe. \u201cContingencies are there to cover things you may not have thought of in the building.
\n\u201cThis is in hindsight, of course, but I don\u2019t think contingencies were a good place to look at covering the mitigation costs for the soil conditions.\u201d
\nIf they had to do it all over again, Mayor Dawe said he would have liked the budget presented all-in rather than having to whittle it down piecemeal.
\n\u201cWe can say next time we\u2019ll do it differently, but the reality is it is probably going to be a while before we have a next time, another substantial facility,\u201d he said. \u201cWe would do it differently, I don\u2019t think there is any question about that. We should have had a third party project manager from the start, because they are very complicated projects. For example, the Region of York has an extremely good capital delivery program handled internally, but they are doing capital delivery projects all the time. We don\u2019t, and it is a very unique skillset, there\u2019s no question.\u201d
\nThe project manager brought on midstream, however, did save Aurora time and money, he contended.
\nThe next capital project on the horizon is a new recreation centre, which is part of Aurora\u2019s 10-year capital plan.
\nThere is no fixed timeline as to when this might move forward for further consideration.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CAO’s report will address lingering concerns over the final costs of the Town\u2019s new Joint Operations Centre, according to Mayor Geoff Dawe. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4iF","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-20 18:19:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}