Dear BC Ferries, Sorry to start your morning off with some very hard questions, but some research I was doing has come up with some very disturbing information about money spending at your corporation. 1. How much are you spending on ripping apart both Spirits to make the interior more retail friendly? A source I have shows about 100 million apiece. 2. You are converting to LNG, but I cannot seem to find any info on how you plan on doing this, even though it is part of an overall plan. Is there a plan how to implement it? Is there a case study? Where are you getting the fuel? How much is it going to cost to train your existing crews to service and maintain these new propulsion systems? 3. I am finding info that the BCF Vacation Center makes revenue of nearly 4 million but that includes the cost of all the partnership hotels. From what I can see, the cost of operation must be enormous since its sitting on the highest retail real estate in BC, perhaps even Canada. 4. I see that you bought 3 bridge simulators and booked off 3 Ships Captains to work on the project. It looks, however, like these simulators are used only once a year. How much does it cost to have these in place, let alone operate only once a year? 5. The Board of Directors meet quarterly, so 4 meetings a year and get paid, as far as I can see, between $30,000 to $60,000. At the highest rate, that is about $15,000 per meeting. Are you getting that much value, from those meetings? 6. I am very concerned about the financing on the debt. $1.6 billion dollars in outstanding bonds . Some of the bonds pay 6.95% yield since its a private company. The provincial government bonds are yielding around 2%. It would appear that we (the taxpayers of BC) are paying 10s of millions more to financing cost to be private, while all the important and final decisions are made by the Minister of Transportation. Sorry. This might be a question better suited to the Minister, than to you. After all, it was their idea to privatize. It seems that the users of the service get downloaded all the cost . The fares have gone up exponentially since privatization in 2003, while the Ministry of Finance looks like they shed the debt. However, if I am reading things right, the Government would be on the hook, if BC Ferries were to go under. I am still digging to verify and confirm this info, but if it is true there is a money waste issue, both now and in the future, that far outweighs the operational costs of the actual ferries. I hope you have some answers that will help clear this up. Thanks. Sean P.S. Was there really no way that we could get out of the severance deal with former CEO, David Hahn? $30,000 a month, for the rest of his life, seems an awfully steep price to pay for the man that got us here, in the first place.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 16:27:33 +0000
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