Home Inspector Ordered to Pay

A BC home inspector was ordered to pay close to $200 000 to couple in Vancouver for a faulty home inspection. I am happy to see this happen as there seems to be no accountability for home inspectors. Mike Holmes has a new TV show called "Holmes Inspection" about faulty home inspections in the Toronto area.

In our case the man we used, recommended to us, was a nice enough guy and seemed moderately through, but in retrospect I am amazed what he missed:

• The basement was not permitted
• The basement was not a legal living space
• The attic was not permitted
• The stairs up and down were not built to code
• The kitchen door was not to code
• He did not do any manner of thermal inspection to see what state the insulation was in
• He missed the problems with the sewer connection
• He missed the lack of venting for the downstairs bathroom
• He missed the incorrect drain pipes and improper connection between the downstairs bathroom and kitchen plumbing
• He missed a main support joist having been cut in two and no shoring up on either side

We bought a house that was advertised as being 3400 square feet in space but only has 1450 square feet of legal living space. Part of me thinks we should have sued the home inspector and selling realtor for not telling us that most of the house was not only not legal, but according to the City of Victoria did not exist.
An older local realtor once let me in on the reasons he uses home inspectors. The only purpose he saw for them was to use the report as a negotiating tool. He was very cynical about them and said that all home inspectors take their direction from realtors because that is where the business comes from.

I would like to see some changes to to liability on home purchases:

• Home inspectors should be held accountible for the reports they issue - certainly the home inspector should be able to point all the work that was done without a permit and make a note of it. The home inspector should be responsible for detailing everything in a house that is not up to the building code.
• Realtors should be held responsible for the state and condition of a property - if you are listing a house, you are responsible for finding and advertising all major defects. The selling realtor should be the one responsible for doing the home inspection and then making it available to everyone.

Realtors make a lot of money from selling houses, they need to held more accountable for what they sell. Liabilty has to lie with them for not revealing things. I feel very strongly about this because a house is the single biggest purchase most people will ever make. I am very glad to have seen this lawsuit succeed against Imre Toth the home inspector, I just wish they had also gone after the selling realtor.

November 11th

On Wednesday I will not be at any Cenotaph. I will be walking along Shelbourne Street from Bay to Hillside and back. The tree planted along Shelbourne were planted as a living memorial to the people from BC that died in World War One.

I plan on starting at 10:45 and welcome anyone that wishes to join me. I will be walking with the Quaker form of worship in my mind. This means I will only speak if I feel the spirit of God is telling me to speak.

Water rates

Not that long ago we paid a total of $2.64 per 100 cubic feet of water used, now it is up to $3.9162 per 100 cubic feet. That is a 50% increase in just over two years. Our summer period water and utility bill from the City of Victoria came to almost $500!

I decided to look into getting a rain barrel to see if I could reduce our summer time use of water. The prices I found for 300 to 400 litre barrels was about $100 to $200. Being an analytical guy I thought I would do some math and see if it would make any difference financially for us.

Working with a 400 litre barrel, this is 14.125 cubic feet, or in water rate terms $0.55 worth of water. For me to save enough water to pay for the cost of the barrel, I would have to fill it up and use it 180 to 360 times to cover the cost.

So how many times would I expect to be able to fill this barrel in the period from May 1st to September 15th, roughly the limits of when I need to water around here? The barrel would be getting water from about 400 square feet of roof and using the data from the UVic weather network for my neighbourhood, I could come up with an approximate number times I could fill it. Looks like about 8 times is what would be a 'normal' year, if I am lucky that could be as high as 12 times, but I am going use an average of 8 times a year. It would take 23 to 46 years for me to save enough water to pay for the initial cost of the barrel.

So how expensive would my water rates have to be to make the rain barrel a useful investment? If I am willing to allow for a seven year return on the investment, and this is longer term than 90% of people consider worthwhile when considering home efficiency improvements, I am looking at water rates of $12.50 to $25 per 100 cubic feet of water, three to six times as much as I pay now.

The normal pay back time that makes the majority of people choose to do something is under three years. At three years the water rates would have to be $30 to $60.

25 Years of CFUV

The station continues on. I worked at the station from 1988 to 1990 for wages that were less than nothing but the job was cool, I put in 60 to 70 hour weeks while still pretending to go to school fulltime at UVic.

CFUV spoiled me, I could not work for commercial radio after the freedom and wild fun of the 'FUV. I had several years of defacto carte blanche to do what I wanted to.

Working for Tim Chan also made it great. Tim has some the driest humour I have ever heard. He was station manager and did not really make enough money to consider it as a career.

It was while I was with CFUV that I had my short stint doing concert promotion. Five concerts and I broke even, I quit at that point. After my last gig I had to empty my bank account to pay the musician, I realized the stress of the gigs was and the money that I could lose was more than I could take.

I loved being a DJ and having to by up on the new music. I loved interviewing bands and musicians. though I did do one major clanger and called one woman by the wrong name. I loved the constant crisis of the moment to keep a station on the air. Crisis and ADD go together well, a crisis calms me down.

One quick anecdote, in 1989 Don Ross had released his first album and was not well known at all. I had not had a chance to hear it yet. I am in the studio doing my Friday morning folk music show and someone was calling the station. I answered because I was the only in the station. A woman asked to speak with Don Ross.

I asked her who is Don Ross. She told me is was this amazing guitarist about to be interviewed at the station about his first album and she was his agent need to talk with him. Yes children, life was much harder before we all had mobile phones.

Clearly I was the one that supposed to be interviewing Don in a matter of a few minutes - no one had told. Either Magnus (the program director) or Colin( the music director) forgot to tell me that they had arranged this interview. I had to quickly find the album and the publicity material so that I might have some hope of being able to interview him.

I managed to read enough stuff, and Don is easy to interview, so it went well. It was this sort of sudden crisis that I loved. I loved things like having to fix a microphone for a DJ by soldering some leads while an LP was playing or having to drop everything where ever I was in town to race to the station if some volunteer did not show to do their show.

If I had the time I would get back into doing radio again, I have the face and body for radio.

The need for a Regional Transportation Authority

The city has now been promised $21 000 000 from the federal government for the replacement of the bridge. This money is not coming from the stimulus money, but from the Build Canada pot of money. This should mean the timelines the city was trying to meet for the stimulus funding are not longer an issue.

Without funding from the province, the cost of the bridge to the city is over $40 000 000 if there are no cost overruns. The city needs to either find some other sources of money for the bridge or scale back the project. The easiest way to scale back the project would be to drop the rail part of the bridge.

The rail portion of the bridge adds a significant cost to the bridge with no benefits to the region. People want to keep the rail aspect of the bridge in the false hopes that this will be part of commuter rail system into the city. The millions of dollars that this will cost the city of Victoria can not justified. The people in the city of Victoria have to pay for the bridge for rail but the rail line has not benefits to people living in the city of Victoria.

If the rail link is important to others, they should come forward with the money to build the rail part of the bridge. $10 000 000 to $15 000 000 from the Island Corridor Foundation would be a reasonable contribution towards the bridge to maintain the rail part of the bridge. If the ICF is not willing to pay for the cost of the bridge, then the rail part of the bridge should not be built. It would only reasonable for the ICF to pay for 100% of the rail portion of the bridge.

I would also like to see Esquimalt agree to contribute something towards the cost of the bridge. Ideally I would like them to cover 1/3 of the local government cost of the bridge. The bridge is vital to Esquimalt and they should be willing to cover some of the costs.

The time has come for this region to have something similar to TransLink. TransLink is not only responsible for transit in the lower mainland, but also for maintaining and improving the major road network. As long as we have 13 randomly created local governments, we need a region wide way to deal with transportation issues.

A CRD regional transportation authority would be able to balance the needs of the major roads and bridges with the transit system. Projects like the Johnson Street Bridge, Mactavish road interchange, or the Spencer road interchange would all come under the mandate of the regional transportation authority. This authority would also be in charge of transit and could take action on transit expansion including an rapid transit ideas.

A regional transportation authority would balance the costs over all of the people of the region and would allow for much better integrated local planning or transportation. The authority would be able to take action on the Malahat.

A regional transportation authority would be able to raise money from local gasoline taxes as is done in Metro Vancouver. A small fuel tax could raise an additional $10 000 000 to $20 000 000 a year for local transportation infrastructure.

A local regional transportation authority would also make it much easier to access contributions from the provincial and federal governments for capital projects in the CRD. Of the three major transportation infrastructure projects currently under way in some way, two of them are being driven not by the needs of the region, but by the interests of a specific large user - Bear Mountain in the case of the Spencer Road interchange and the airport in the case of the Mactavish road interchange. Our transportation infrastructure is not being driven by the needs of the region.

There are many upsides to a regional transportation authority and few downsides. The time has come for the regional politicians to push for the province to create our own TransLink.

Trees and Developments

I was sitting outside of the Starbucks at Tillicum and Gorge and noticing that the trees in the parking lot were getting to of a size where they added something to the landscape, that they could offer some shade. I also know that this little strip mall is very likely in its last ten years of life. With these two thoughts something came into my mind - the lifespan of most trees is at least twice as long as the lifespan of any development.

The average apartment/house/strip mall etc... has a realistic lifespan of about 4 to 50 years. One only needs to look around the neighbourhoods first built in the 1950s and 60s to see how many of the houses have been torn down and replaced with something newer. A strip mall that makes it past 40 years is rarity. We can look further back and see how few of the buildings built between 1890 and 1930 are still around, many of them were torn down with a generation of being built.

In drawings of developments there are always these wonderful mature trees, trees that take 40 to 50 years to mature. And there is the problem, by the time trees begin to leave their youth the development they are around gets bulldozed for something new.

Many of the trees that are planted have lifespans of several hundred years, they barely have started and we cut them down. The problem is that we can not think in timeframes that are tree like in length.

As a nine year old child I was in Finland in 1975. With the family over there we visited a church yard where there was a grave of an ancestor of ours, a grave from the 17th century. There was a wonderful big tree growing out of this grave, a tree about 300 years old, a tree not close to the end of its life. The tree was over growing the whole grave. The tree had been there for generations, it was a direct link between myself and my 17th century Schulmann ancestor. The three century timeframe is beyond human understanding.

As humans we perceive the world in a few generations. We tend to divide our world into the recent generation, the past generation and our parents youth. The last two meld when we are young into one. 25-30 years is our limit of what we consider recent and current, something older than that on the landscape is something from a past generation. We see things more than a generation old as being old, but we do not value you them till they are from a time before our parents.

This means that the developments we see become old long before their time. We can tear it down and build something new. With it we tear down the trees just as they are becoming what they could be.

Even trees planted for a purpose can be lost to future generations. The trees along Shelbourne were planted some 80 years ago as a living memorial to all the men killed in World War One. The trees are finally reaching the age where they are truly stunning, but so many of them have already been cut down. Their purpose has also been lost to the people of 2009.

People are also unable to see the life of trees when it comes to logging, they only see the clearcut, not the forest emerging again. Forests take generations to grow and clearcuts look bad in the present generation. We do not seem to have the patience to wait for the forest to come back.

As I was sitting their looking at these trees outside of the Starbucks I was struck with sadness that odds are very high they will not see another ten years. Sad that the hard work of the people building the small strip mall would also be lost.

Johnson Street Bridge - who should pay

Given that the bridge is not very relevant to most of the people that live in the City Victoria but is crucial for people in Esquimalt and View Royal, why is it that the City is bearing the full burden of the bridge?

Saanich is not expected to be responsible for Highway #17, Langford is not responsible for Highway #1, but it is up to Victoria to deal with the Johnson Street Bridge. This bridge is crucial to the whole region, but only about 25% of the regional population is expected to pay. The City is clearly going to go forward with the bridge, it is time for the other 12 local governments in the region to come to the table and pay for the bridge. The CRD has a moral obligation to pay for 75% of the local costs for this bridge.

If the other communities are not willing to contribute to the Johnson Street Bridge, then Victoria should refuse to contribute to any CRD projects to the extent of the cost of the Johnson Street bridge.

The idea that a $63 000 000 ball park estimate (the range of costs is $55 - $75 million if there are no unforseen problems) is going to be solely borne by Victoria is unfair and unreasonable.

Has anyone looked at the impact of building a much bigger Point Ellice bridge for traffic movement and getting rid of the Johnson Street Bridge completely? I think this is a much smarter traffic management solution and gets rid of the whole need for a bridge that opens. I guess I just feel that the whole process has not looked at what it is we need and who will pay. No one has considered innovative approaches to the the Johnson Street Bridge.