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$2.00 Your community newspaper since 1916
Thursday, April 8, 2021
PGCITIZEN.CA
PRINCEGEORGECITIZEN
More emails link mayor to parkade
HANDOUT PHOTO
Tammy Manning of McBride won $13 million in a recent Lotto Max draw. She is seen here with Amber Bhaskar, the lottery retailer at the McBride Husky/Esso.
MCBRIDE WOMAN WINS $13M Tammy Manning from McBride won the $13 million Lotto Max prize and the draw date is going to get inked on her arm by her son, a tattoo artist, as a part of the celebration. “I told my son I won while he was in the middle of doing a tattoo,” Manning recalled. “He said ‘there’s no way, mom, – no you didn’t!’” Manning purchased the ticket from McBride Husky/Esso in a $20 Lotto Max pack and got her numbers using the Quick Pick option. It was the only ticket across Canada to match all seven numbers during the mid-
March draw. “I went to the Husky that I always go to and the retailer knows who I am,” Manning said. “I checked the ticket on the self-checker and suddenly the amount appeared across the screen. All I said was ‘No!’ I just didn’t believe it and kept saying ‘No!’ to myself. I had to have the retailer check the ticket on his machine.” Amber Bhaskar, the lottery retailer at the McBride Husky/Esso, was there when she scanned her winning ticket. “When Tammy validated her ticket… she was about to fall down,” Bhaskar said about the day he and his staff realized
Manning had purchased the jackpot-winning ticket at his store. “She’s a loyal customer since we moved here – it’s really happy to see somebody winning from the local town.” Manning will pay off her house first, then it might be a vacation home in the Caribbean next with a sailboat, too. She also plans to gift some to family, the part of winning that means the most to her. “It feels so good that I’m able to help and do something good with it,” she added. “This will change my life and it means I can retire and can help those close to me.”
ARTHUR WILLIAMS Just hours after the developer warned that the new downtown parkade was going to be more than $7 million over budget, Mayor Lyn Hall and then-city manager Kathleen Soltis began exchanging emails about her spending authority. At the time, the city manager could only approve up to $1 million in cost overruns on any given capital project but in May 2019, city council approved an increase to the city manager’s spending authority up to five per cent of the city’s total annual operating budget or about $8 million. In a press conference on Jan. 25, Hall said other than Soltis’ initial email to him on July 4, 2018, he had no further updates on the cost overruns on the parkade until a report came before council on Dec. 7, 2020. On Feb. 26, 2020, roughly nine months before the report was produced, Soltis used that authority to authorize $6.64 million in cost overruns associated to the parkade project from 2019, without requiring city council approval, documents obtained by The Citizen show. On the afternoon of July 4, 2018, A & T Project Developments Inc. president Jeff Arnold emailed the city an updated budget for the project, showing the estimated cost at $19.98 million – or $.738 million more than the city had budgeted. About an hour earlier, Soltis had forwarded Hall an email from A & T partner Frank Quinn, warning the project was facing “very large overruns.” See XXXX page XX