FACE TO FACE: Should Coquitlam privatize food services at the sports centre?

With the tab for the ongoing expansion and renovation of the Coquitlam sports centre now running at about $62 million, it’s no wonder civic leaders are looking for ways to ease the long-term load on taxpayers.

This explains why the city is going ahead with a plan to bring in an outside contractor to operate the food and beverage services at the revamped centre, work on which is scheduled to be completed next year.

According to a study commissioned by the city and discussed by council in September, maintaining the current, city-run set-up could result in the city — in other words, taxpayers — losing about $130,000 a year. On the other hand, bringing in an outside contractor could result in a $30,000 annual profit.

The city will have a better idea about the size of profits that might be made when it begins to wade through private companies’ Request for Information/Expressions of Interest applications; the deadline for filing the documents was this past Tuesday afternoon.

A casual observer might conclude that privatization makes perfect sense but civic services being civic services, the issue isn’t quite so cut and dried. The problem is that the current food and beverage operation employs eight unionized workers earning $20 an hour while an outside operator would likely pay only $15 an hour.

With well-paid, unionized positions on the table, the Canadian Union of Public Employees stirred up quite a fuss at a council meeting in September, even though city officials said the affected employees would be transferred to other civic jobs.

Not surprisingly, the brouhaha also succeeded in sparking a debate in this corner of the newspaper. My colleague opposite states flatly, “I don’t like privatization,” and suggests that contracting out is a “false economy” that blames workers for “the inefficiencies of management.”

But while my colleague rejects privatization on principle, I prefer to look at the pertinent facts first. And here, these facts plainly favour contracting out. If I’m dogmatic about anything, it’s about protecting taxpayers’ money.

In this light, then, it seems to me that the $160,000 difference between the status quo and contracting out is especially significant, especially at a time when every property owner in the city is facing an above-inflation tax increase in the coming year.