Village Hall

Regular readers know that over a month ago there was an unexplained outbreak of illness in the NBV Village Hall at the Lexi.  Several employees took sick in what looked like an environmental poisoning incident.  Since that time, the village has hired independent environmental hygienists to try and find the root cause.  There have no been no definitive findings but some attempts to return to the building resulted in further complaints about sickness related to the air inside.

Currently, the police are operating out of the Galleon St. facility while the administration has been shoehorned  into a group of offices on the second floor of the building at 1666 JFK Causeway.  There is not much chance of returning to the Lexi Building and negotiations are underway to move the village offices to the 1666 building.   

North Bay Village would be well rid of its relationship with the Lexi.  It was tainted from the beginning when the late George Kane, aided and abetted by his fellow commissioners, proposed and pushed for the move to the Lexi rather than concentrate on building a proper village hall.   The move was never designed to benefit the city but rather to create a generous commission payment to George Kane and help the developer by providing a high visibility tenant on the ground floor of an otherwise still vacant project.   The offices were never as nice as the ones held previously at 1666 and cost the city over $80,000 to move and about $20,000 more per year since.  

In short, it was a bad move, motivated by personal greed and corporate welfare.  It should all have been stopped before the move when the underhanded dealings were brought to light.  The details can be found here.

So now, three years on, we can't and we shouldn't go back there.  The village needs to move forward and that means taking the construction of a new civic facility seriously.  We need a clean reboot to stop being caught in the web of the past.  

Kevin Vericker

May 7, 2013  

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