Friday, Nov. 24
By Paul Dechene

How are you doing, Councillor Mancinelli?

Not too bad, not too bad… Actually, that’s a lie. I’m fucking horrible, man

Yeah, you’re usually the jocular, laid-back guy on council. But you seemed absolutely pissed at the last meeting.

Not mad, not mad in the least, actually. Very, very scared.

Oh, really! How come? 

Well, I’m sitting in a room. We’re talking about thedebt of REAL. People are referring to it as a surprise. And it’s been our job for some of us seven years. We’ve been reported back on these things.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve been in those meetings, has it not been talked about?

Oh, yeah, especially like that big infrastructure deficit. That’s been, you know, for years.

Then, am I the only guy, when someone says $44 million, and I think back years and I start rolling that number up for inflation? I know it’s grown. Don’t you do that, too? Or is that a superpower I have [sarcasm]?

It’s not a superpower, or shouldn’t be anyways.

Number one, to have a decision like this being talked about, and the surprise in the room? For the people that I’ve shared history with, it makes me wonder about the wisdom going forward that we’re sharing in making this huge decision, and are they being truthful about their memory or not? Or is it just convenient memory?

And then, over and above all that, the sideways facility costing? It has been well documented the effects of that through COVID — we were brought up to date throughout COVID.

The business model is built on bums in seats!

So yeah, we’re leading up to repeating a mistake that we just shamed ourselves with months ago. And we had consultants consult on and talk about it, and they found it was about overloading too many entities at one time and expecting them to be able to take it all on, no matter how big a superstar they are. And now, we’re pushing towards repeating that outcome.

We’ve got a city manager who has been here for a year and got off to a crazy start.

And all of a sudden, with no history of the facility, we’re going to uproot that? And now, I’m hearing today that the plan is to use city managers to staff the board in the interim? Some of those guys, take Barry Lacey [chief financial officer for the city]… I’ve seen resignation letters and farewell letters come through. I think he’s missing his three senior managers! And he’s got a city to already account for. Literally!

The overworking is what led to the mess we’-re in. I can go into it piece by piece, but I guess you get where I’m going with this. Does that sound insane to you?

So yeah, I’m not mad. I’m scared.

Did anyone in the council meeting mention the amount of money that the little Brandt Center, whatever it’s called, in Moose Jaw, how much they have to fund it because of pandemic costs? I guess no one reads the news. They must all be blocked by Facebook or something. No one pays attention. I believe it’s on scale [with Mosaic], around a million dollars. I didn’t read their financial statements, but there again, maybe I got the superpower of kind of interpreting the scale. That’s a smaller property without a billion dollars’ worth of assets. But they need a million bucks, too. Isn’t that weird?

So much of this stuff, I think this has been hyped up over the likability of a man compared to the job and the asset and the running of it. I think these decisions are just emotion over fact.

And, yeah, it’s hard to defend a guy who makes a big income. Like man, I’ve bled my knuckles. I know the feeling. I get the societal feeling. I understand it. I feel it. But I also took on a responsibility of being a good steward for the people of the city, and I don’t get to just feel. I actually have to meet the guy and look at the job he’s doing, and hold him accountable.

My residents have the luxury of feeling. That’s their luxury. I can understand how they feel. But I have to be accountable for the solvency of an operation.

What about though… one of the things I’ve heard about REAL is how the city’s CFO would have signed off on all of REAL’s budgets. And so there’s the culpability of city administration and council in signing off on all of this extra debt and the finances of REAL. But at the same time, like the REAL board and Tim Reid and Tim Reid’s predecessor, they were the people who were coming to council, saying, “We need more debt. We can handle more debt,” and saying, “You know, we want a stadium. We can manage a stadium, the International Trade Center.”

Paul, please, timelines. Look at your timelines. I wasn’t here. I came on council because I disagreed with what we can manage versus what we need. Yeah. I [was elected to council] when those were already assets. And it made me question things because I didn’t understand — and Tim Reid came after that too — there had been a business model implemented by predecessors to try to account for all the ‘we wants/we needs’, but we didn’t have enough to pay [for it all].

Also, there’s the neglect of the facility. It’s worth a billion dollars. There’s how many buildings on that facility that have something about them that’s falling apart? So not only do you have to maintain an asset that’s massive, but you also have to go look after all the little barns that you had for the last 100 years. You’re putting all of that budget [for new assets] on top of a budget that ran all those little barns. So how do we manage that? Well, we have this here asset [which] has shows, right? Because a show brings with it the money from the food and beverages. That can go back towards maintaining and paying for the asset. Well, how do we manage that when we need someone who understands that industry? What do we do? We pay for a massive headhunt to find a guy like Tim Reid, who we all hate because he gets a big wage, right.

I walked into this before the pandemic. He started shortly after me. If I remember my timeline on council, I wasn’t aware of how the committee was structured, or any of that stuff. I’m in there learning. And this guy comes along. I hear about the business plan. I see how sideways it is. I shit my pants. But we didn’t have a pandemic yet. And so we go through. We have our start-ups. The stadium gets activated a couple of times. We have our events, and you know we’re skin of our teeth — make a couple $100,000 — so that couple of hundred grand that we used to give for the barns and everything else? He was able to activate it. So we kept on operating the same way like nothing happened right?

He almost pulled it off!

And then the pandemic hit.

Well, I’m not going to go blaming the pandemic for society’s woes, but when your whole strategy for revenue is based on entertainment and sport, you’re one of the big ones to get hit.

Can I hold him accountable for not shuttering it [during the pandemic]? I don’t know. I think he was trying to look out for staff, because it’s a city-owned entity. And you have to be caring when you’re a city. So there were those obligations.

Do I want to go through and protect them [REAL] through everything? No. You’re at the council meetings. Those other councillors are at the council meetings. [CFO] Barry Lacey was at those meetings. We all talked about this thing. We all heard about how the revenues are made, how it flows through, the effect this is having. We looked at the ways the facilities were shifted for different uses to try to bring back some of that money.

Do I hate the guy for what? For losing money? Well, I’m businessman. I didn’t see him sitting there. I didn’t see him burning it. Maybe he could have cut back his senior management — who were really expensive because they were trying to head hunt for these big shows — but I didn’t know if the pandemic would be a year or three years. I don’t think you did, either.

I can’t go back in time with hindsight.

One of the things I struggle with is — and Councillors Bresciani and Nelson brough this up — they talked about the difficulty of getting questions answered to their satisfaction. This is not a slam on Tim Reid in any way because I’ve had phenomenal access as a person with him. He’s given wonderful interviews that have been completely open and honest. But when you move up to the board… access is difficult. Getting documents is also limited. Long story short, this leaves me with questions about the entire concept of having an arm’s length, municipal corporations for something like this.

There were warnings long before COVID that the whole REAL thing was vulnerable to a shock.

A house of cards.

Exactly. One of the first times I saw Henry Baker Hall filled up was when the city brought forward the financial model for the [new Mosaic] Stadium. You had university professors coming in saying, “This isn’t going to work.” The city said, “Oh, no, this totally works, and we can totally do this.” So, I’m sympathetic to the public’s reaction to what’s going on right now. There’s always been a suspicion that the REAL model doesn’t work — it’s a house of cards and now they see it tumbling down. I think maybe there’s some laughing while Rome burns. And there’s a sense that we need something different. I thought I had a question in here but I’m just making a statement.

I can totally speak to it. I agree with you. I’ve been a councillor for seven years. Your summary of events leading to the Stadium, and how the land was used, and how we budgeted, and how we bought things? I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think the house of cards was built on that budgeting.

I ran for council on asset management. You know my political stance. So yeah, totally built a house of cards. But coming in as a councillor, that’s an operating machine right there and we have to deal with tax dollars. And it’s still running.

It’s like, we have a car that has to get us to Moose Jaw. It’s still running. We have to be there in a half hour but it’s got a bad misfire. If we miss our appointment, someone dies. But if I have to replace a piston, I have to shut the car off for that. Do I shut the car off? Or do we get you to the emergency first?

Things can be done in an organized manner. Let things settle and try to plan through how we can implement a change and working towards it.

We could have instructed the current board to do that and work towards it if we wanted change. Pragmatically. But right now we have a 2.2% mill rate increase. We’re recovering from the pandemic. We have a house of cards with a stadium that’s already been built, and things that are there that are not imaginary.

When you shake it up, you pay for the repercussions.

I like the talk of change, the talk of how to get that place activated, a new structure. I was open to all of that. But I wasn’t open to just firing Tim Reid after three years of a pandemic and a crash in the tourism industry with 65 per cent of the tourism coming through REAL.

I was in favour of moving towards a change, and trying to let people start to prosper again after an extremely hard time.

The mortgage doesn’t go away by being a hero and making people see you. You beat up Tim Reid in public? And now you’re going to take all your senior management who are supposed to be implementing an efficiency review that is supposed to be saving taxpayers money and helping us beat the inflation curve, and you’re going to sidetrack them with all of this?

Again, Barry Lacey is missing his three senior managers. Are my fellow councillors not paying attention to their duties? What are we going for here?

Back to pragmatic planning and forward thinking, I don’t get to play in the eye of the public. I have to vote on how much that’s going to cost us to do and live with the repercussions of those decisions. So, me? I’ll defend Tim Reid because I saw him actually put a plan together — a long-term plan — that he was making come together. The McDonald’s showing up was part of a commercial lease plan to try to get commercial entities on the property. That plan came together because he understood the business model about the bums in seats of the property. He did great things like the pickle ball and the skateboard park to try to make those buildings work. He tried to cobble things together to get the numbers up to prove a commercial case.

Will administration be able to capitalize on that and offset those costs to the public? I don’t have as much faith in it as I thought.

There’s no longer a business plan I can count on for next year’s budget so we might have a chance to stop some of the bleeding again. I think that’s kind of thrown away.