I’m glad I don’t live in Saanich. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a beautiful place, with a nice feel, moderate climate, and good people. But the property taxpayers of Saanich are being taken for an expensive ride by a coordinated CUPE assault.

Blog readers will remember that on Monday, I was on CFAX Radio with Murray Langdon, talking about how Saanich taxpayers lost $820,000 on the Cedar Hill golf course and restaurant last year. On Tuesday, I posted a CUPE flyer which made it clear that all CUPE cares about is saving their members’ jobs—at any cost to taxpayers. So what if they have to cut your pay to save their own? So what if a golf course and restaurant is as far from a key, life-saving priority as a municipality can get?

That’s why I suggested CUPE’s workers pool their resources, buy Cedar Hill themselves, and show us taxpayers just how bad their bosses really were by turning the operation around and making boatloads on money.

Well, in today’s Saanich News, I was ecstatic to read that the union chef thinks he and his fellow CUPE staffers can do a better job running the place:

The restaurant’s chef, Dino Clarkson, suggested having staff currently employed in the restaurant and pro shop manage the entire operation.

Dino, what better way to prove it then by buying the operation? Stick it to those politicians and show them how great Cedar Hill can be—but do it without massive taxpayer subsidies.

Seriously, folks: the money issues at Cedar Hill have been a problem for a decade:

The Cedar Hill golf course’s troublesome deficit has been a dark cloud for almost a decade.

As early as 2002, the course’s revenues started to decline. Over the years it was hoped changes to green fees and the installation of a new $2-million irrigation system would attract more people to the club.  That didn’t happen.

In 2009 Saanich commissioned a $40,000 report to determine how to reverse the golf course’s fortunes.

“There’s so many assumptions and unknowns associated with whether the recommendations (from the report) are going to work or not,” said Doug Henderson, director of parks and recreation. “What (the report) said was ‘based on our background knowledge of golf, what we found at Cedar Hill, and what we think we know about the golf industry, here are some of the things we think will work.’”

Of the 64 recommendations that came in that report, Henderson says the majority were implemented. And despite Saanich’s optimism in 2010 that the changes would collectively help make the course financially sustainable, the course is still bleeding money.

Saanich has down their due diligence, and made a smart decision reducing the hours at the restaurant. The next logical step is to sell the whole facility, protecting right-of-ways and trails for the casual user, but putting the course in the hands of experts who will make the tough decisions necessary to turn a profit. If that’s the present employees, more power to them. But the councillors now buckling to union pressure tactics (I wonder how many of them took campaign donations from CUPE—I guess we’ll have to wait until disclosures next month to find out) should give their head a shake and stick to their original, unanimous, correct position: do what it takes to stop the drain on property taxpayers.