(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)

OPINION

In a week when the spectacular and devastating failure by the City of Penticton to afford the most basic of protections to one of its most vulnerable citizens was revealed, I should first say something about our story on Kelowna’s mayor this week.

We reported that Colin Basran is living in an expensive waterfront home owned by a developer, one basic math suggests would be difficult for him to afford were he paying rent at market prices.

Actually I’m not going to say anything about it for now, I’m going to leave it to one of our commenters under a Facebook profile of Sean Irg.

“Part of his job is making sure that there’s no cause for questions like this.”

Sometimes readers really hit it out of the park.

Which brings us back to Penticton. B.C.’s Ombudsperson, Jay Chalke, revealed this week the City of Penticton sold a woman’s home at a fraction of its price to collect unpaid taxes.

READ MORE: City of Penticton sells vulnerable woman's home over $10K unpaid tax bill

There’s a lot of details to it, but read that sentence again because it’s the only one that matters.

The City’s CAO Donny van Dyk is digging in his heels, claiming they did nothing wrong, even praising his staff. But when you read that sentence again, there’s one immediate, inescapable question — who in their right mind would allow their $420,000 home to be sold for $150,000 to pay $10,000 in debt?

No one in their right mind would. There’s no other conclusion. Had the City considered this at any point in the three-year process of exercising extraordinary power afforded only to municipalities, Chalke says the City would have asked some questions.

If they had, they’d have realized the 60-year-old woman living there was, well, “vulnerable” is all Chalke’s report says, but we know she had no capacity to understand any of this. We hope to report more details on that soon.

I’m tempted by experience to believe a great many bureaucrats have no notion that the people they serve are citizens. They’re only taxpayers. Or not. I don’t mean in the 10,000-foot view of planners and administrators designing cities in public, I mean throughout the system.

Chalke detailed multiple errors in the 14 different notices and one phone call to the homeowner over roughly three years before taking her home. Wrong deadlines, wrong dates, wrong legal citations. None of them really indicate the gravity of their intended action. It suggests this process — of potentially putting a citizen on the street — never had a chance for an actual person to ask those basic questions. It looks like it’s done by rote. You’d think machines did it.

But that would be nitpicking. Of course it’s by rote. Cities and towns have to do this every year for various reasons. Ironically, news of this whole travesty will probably save finance departments across the province lots of time this year as people rush to pay their taxes. Only 1% ever get to an actual sale in Penticton. Because again, no one in their right mind would let this happen.

It’s a mistake, pure and simple. And when that happens, to whom do we look to fix it and make her whole? Do we really need lawyers and judges and a lot more money to make you correct your error?
To make up her lost $280,000, that’s $10 per person in the city. It’s .0002% of your $140 million budget.

van Dyk, on behalf of the City, has already said Penticton won’t pay the woman anything. And he doesn’t care what you or I think, only what mayor and councillors think.

Most of them aren’t answering yet. Maybe, like Mayor John Vassilaki says he’s doing, they’re all thinking this over carefully.

Remove all doubt. Make all the citizens of Penticton know you’ll do what’s right.

Do it. Pay her.

As Sean Irg would say: Part of your job is making sure that there’s no cause for questions like this.

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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