Iqaluit city council ponders new digs

ARTHUR JOHNSON

Iqaluit Mayor Elisapee Sheutiapik, who capitalized on her popularity as the proprietor of a renowned local coffee house to win the top job at city hall, now has her sights set on having the city take over the Nunavut legislature.

Sheutiapik’s designs on the legislature reflect the discontent she shares with her senior administrators about the sorry state of the city’s municipal offices.

After hearing a long, detailed analysis of many of the shortcomings of the building that council and its administration shares with the Iqaluit fire department, emergency services and the civic arena, Sheutiapik humorously suggested that an easy solution would be to wait until the legislature builds a new home, and then offer to buy the old legislature building “for a buck.”

Her comments provided some comic relief at the meeting this week of the engineering and planning committee, which heard Ian Fremantle, Iqaluit’s chief administrative officer, catalogue many of the shortcomings of the existing municipal offices.

Fremantle said that there are just two windows in the entire space occupied by municipal officials, and those windows are in the finance department.

When city officials sought to find at least a stop-gap solution to their problems, he said, they were told by one prospective contractor that installing more windows and providing other upgrades would cost a prohibitive $750,000.

Aside from being deprived of a view of the city they serve, Fremantle said municipal staff face some real obstacles because of the building they now occupy.

For instance, he said, he was recently approached by an employee who needed a copy of her 1995 statement of earnings. “Good luck,” was his response.

Fremantle explained that the municipality has no space to store documents in its present location, and is storing paper in a few different locations around Iqaluit. Some of the storage locations are in such bad shape that documents have been damaged by water or destroyed.

And, he added, he has just been notified that boilers used to heat the building “are on their last legs” and will cost about $60,000 to replace.

Fremantle said he’s been approached by developers eager to do a co-ownership or outright lease deal with the city for new premises, but because municipal departments are both spread out in different premises and growing, he has no firm idea how much space would even be required in a new building.

The developers include the Nunavut Construction Corporation, which recently approached the city with an offer of space in offices to be constructed in a future phase of the Inuksugait Plaza.

As part of their pitch, NCC officials offered to do an analysis of space requirements by city hall and to prepare floor plans at the plaza for a fee of $4,500.

The committee decided to recommend that council approve the expenditure after hearing Fremantle say that he had told NCC officials that the city would not feel bound or obligated in any way to lease space from them or any other developer simply because they had conducted the analysis.