One more chapter on the hotel saga

Now I know it's only $10,000 and some people are getting tired of this story but it's our money so we have a right to know.
Council/administration in their wisdom decided eighteen months ago to hire a consultant to put together a feasibility study for a hotel on the former CLC site.
Rich Eichler Consulting dined at the trough known has the municipality of Crowsnest Pass to the tune of a cool $10,000 and delivered a feasibility study in January 2012 that would give us a "leg up" when we went out to seek hotel investors.
Well after posting a Request For Proposals for months we get "one" company that takes advantage of this golden opportunity, just escaping from court protection "Medican" well we all know how that story worked out (or do we)
So fast forward to July 23 Chris Vachon informs us that just a year later, after Mr Eichler delivered his study that Best Western spent $25,000 on a new feasibility study, did the first one miss something ? Did we waste our $10,000?
Let's fast forward to this week's Pass Herald to the comments from Mr Jeff Carlson CAO of clay cup developers, the company that initially looked at working with Medican and the Municipality of Crowsnest Pass. What did he have to say about the feasibility study "I check out feasibility reports all the time I am not a amateur and the report was amateurish, a waste of money".
How much more money was spent on legal fees putting together the contract with Medican that at one point the CAO told us required 80 some revisions? I hope it wasn't a lot.
The big concern now in line with both Councilor's Saindon and Saje's arguments against accepting the tender for the demolition of the Centre last week is we don't know what the total cost for the remediation of that building is going to be?
Let's hope this story is almost over.

Crowsnest Centre Lands-Development Feasibility Study

Administration brought forth a recommendation to spend $4000 to use Rich Eichler Consulting Ltd to conduct a feasibility study to identify development opportunities for this site.
I was anticipating a large fight over this proposal, when previous council rezoned that land to commercial Councilor Mitchell was furious, in fact Councilor Taje had proposed to put aside that land for future municipal use and Councilor Mitchell strongly supported that position.
So I expected that strong voice to lead the opposition to this proposal, I also expected some members of this council to spearhead the drive to invest into and reopen the centre. All I heard for the last couple of years from those individuals was what a great place it was and all it gave to this community and how critical it was to keep it going.
(Remember the editorials Crowsnest Pass will lose the education consortium if this place closed)
But then again based on their actions most of our elected officials have realised that the municipality could not even afford to operate a library in Bellevue let alone a 30,000 square foot decrepit building that the Alberta government determined to be unsuitable has a hospital 35 years ago.

Any way maybe I'm of base here and the recommendation of this study will be to use the site for future municipal use.