The twisting-dome crisis at the legislature deflated this week, as politicians decided to back up and take another look at the issue.
Which is a common-sense move. It would be a bigger story if the dome atop the 115-year-old building hadn’t shifted slightly over the years. It’s a century-old building made of stone and masonry at the water’s edge. Of course it’s going to shift.
A report suggested the dome was turning into a problem that might become the No. 1 priority. That prompted a quick check of domes on public institutions in the same earthquake zone in which we dwell.
That check confirmed the obvious — once the shifting is labelled as a problem, it costs millions of dollars to fix it.
Speaker Linda Reid said she has gleaned that domes move, but not continuously.
“They have found a new home, usually within an inch ... and have come to rest.
“If that’s the case in B.C., that’s actually good news for us. The reality is we don’t know that today.”
So the decision was made this week to measure the degree of crisis right down to the millimetre. An accelerometer will be strapped into the dome structure to produce a reading.
The experts who periodically crawl all over the building have one reading from 2006. It’s not publicly available, but it is a nominal measurement of movement from 1898 to 2006.
The device will eventually produce a reading of any movement from 2006 until now. That’s the number that will help determine the priority of all the different renovation jobs that need doing at the Inner Harbour’s centrepiece.
Whatever the finding is, taxpayers can be assured they are still facing a multimillion-dollar renovation bill. And the big difference over the past few years is a shift in political sentiment to actually do something about it.
There are any number of engineering reports pointing out the dire need to fix outdated systems, water leaks and other deficiencies. The cost estimates range from a few million dollars up to $250 million. But most of them were produced privately for the secretive management committee, which didn’t do much of anything about them.
The Legislative Assembly Management Committee embarked on a new approach toward openness and transparency after a scorching auditor general’s report. (This week’s meeting was only the fifth public one it has ever had.)
It coincided with a new push to do something about the building itself.
There’s a long list of items on the to-do list, apart from the dome. An engineering report from 2006 lists dozens of items under four main headings: health and safety risks, deterioration, obsolescence of systems and inadequate functionality.
An update to that report last month noted: “Given that seven years have passed since the completion of the original plan, it need not be said that the ‘critical’ items are now more critical, the ‘urgent’ items are now perhaps critical and the ‘required’ items are now urgent.”
So if the dome is found to be safe, it’s not as if the money will be saved. It will just be spent somewhere else on the long list of critical and urgent problems that need fixing.
Just So You Know: Elsewhere on the agenda, Finance Minister Mike de Jong tiptoed back to a topic that scorched the B.C. Liberals the last time it was raised six years ago. Former speaker Bill Barisoff blundered into a major fight when he decided — on behalf of former premier Gordon Campbell — to consider effectively closing the legislature library. The idea was dropped moments after it became public, in the face of widespread dismay.
De Jong said he didn’t want to light the same fuse, but pondered what the library’s mandate is. “I must confess that after 20 years, I no longer do have that clear sense.”
MLAs concurred it would be worthwhile to have a conversation about how to make better use of the library as an important provincial resource.
The 2007 idea revolved around turning it into some kind of reception hall. It looks as if they’ll be using a much lighter touch this time around.
