Our new Canfor Leisure Pool is failing and it gives new significance to the pool designer’s statements made back in 2020.
“This project for us has never just been about a swimming pool,” Nebraska-based design firm HDR vice-president Mark Hetze told the Prince George Citizen at the time. “(What) we really wanted to build and express was the values and character of Prince George.”
What, we are bad with money, bad with our architecture, and bad with being authentic?
If the city were true to its roots it would never have clad the exterior with cheap New Zealand pine. We would have showcased our own wood. Nor would a serious, working-class city have given up serious oversight of the mechanical and architectural drawings that have routinely failed us on recent public projects.
Of course, we don’t have much choice when we no longer have in-house mechanical, architectural and engineering expertise. I hear we have only a single skilled engineer on staff. We don’t have the capacity to design or manage bigger projects even if we wanted to. It all gets farmed out to the lowest bidder nowadays.
When it comes to faulty design, superfluous architectural statements and incoherent drawings, we get what we pay for, and it’s not just the pool I’m talking about. That silly curved roof on the new firehall is another great example.
It’s part of the governance paradigm of our time: Only the private sector and the consultants can design and deliver big projects. Only profit-motivated firms can be trusted to put the public interest ahead of private gain and architectural ego. The public service is best left starved of responsibility, morale and self-confidence.
City hall is so committed to this philosophy we even privatized building inspections of large projects, effectively stripping city staff of their critical role in protecting basic public safety.
As far as I know, city inspectors were not even allowed to inspect the new pool to catch the long and growing list of deficiencies.
By implementing their extreme version of a professional reliance model, the city sidelined the expertise and experience of in-house building inspectors and other professionals, cutting them out of the review process entirely. All we have now is after-the-fact litigation if things go sideways.
This sparked a letter of protest last year from the city’s building inspection team that is well worth revisiting.
“Building officials are no longer permitted to review plans for complex buildings or perform on-site inspections for complex building or plumbing inspections,” the letter read. “We would like to express our concerns for this new change in process, and other changes that have occurred within the department and division within the last couple years.”
It's like we haven’t learned anything from this same experiment in forestry. Privatization in the woods means we now rely on external consultants and “experts” employed by logging companies to manage our public assets, leaving key safeguards and oversight — once integral to ensuring the public interest — in the hands of private actors with little to no direct accountability to the public.
Look at how well that’s worked out.
And yet this tune of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, the New Public Management, whatever you want to call it, continues to lull us to slumber.
For once we thought we’d found the right recipe in tearing down a recently renovated hotel and offloading the responsibility of spending $35 million dollars through a privatized design, delivery and management model. The city could sit back and not do any work, not even safety inspections.
What a rude awakening we are in for.
