Interesting to see that the president of the St. John's Board of Trade, Marilyn Thompson, is actually contradicting St. John's mayor Andy Wells.
Wells, you may recall, claimed that everything with city infrastructure was just tickety-boo and that candidates like Simon Lono just didn't know what they were talking about when they claimed the city faced an infrastructure deficit.
Well, Thompson told a St. John's Rotary club on Wednesday that indeed the city did have an infrastructure deficit - that's the term she used - and that St. John's was going to have a problem coming up with the cash to deal with it.
Here's a link to the speech.
Here's a little excerpt: [Thompson said a bunch of other things that should have been said earlier in the campaign. Good stuff!]
"As I already mentioned, one of the City'’s biggest challenges is maintaining infrastructure.
The truth is that St. John'’s is facing an infrastructure deficit. We simply don'’t have the money it would take to meet all of our infrastructure demands. The City has been doing a fine job keeping up with those demands with the resources it has. But, significant capital expenditure is required in the operating budget to simply maintain existing infrastructure, let alone to upgrade and develop new infrastructure."
Thompson praised city staff for doing the best with what they had, but there could be no mistaking her agreement with Lono's basic contention that the city was falling behind in maintaining its roads, water and sewer services.
Poof. Turns out Lono was right after all.
This whole thing is even more interesting considering that only a few months ago Thompson was backing Andy to head the federal-provincial offshore regulatory board.
