Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, we've spent a considerable amount of time over the last few days talking about the proposed student housing renovations in Fort Smith. We got from the Minister some reports on particularly the Green House and Brown House yesterday, which outlined the deficiencies and the expected cost to repair them. In both of those documents, it was in the area of $200,000 to $250,000 to deal with the basic requirements, which we assume would mean dealing with the fire marshal's deficiencies that were found. Members were told that it would cost in the area of $1.5 million to rehabilitate these properties. Given the size of them, I think we are hard pressed to understand why we would rehabilitate them when it looked like for very close to that price you could build new. In fact, that was what was wanted. So Members have had a considerable amount of discussion about this, and are of the feeling that if there are life safety issues with those buildings, that they should be dealt with. If that's going to take $200,000 then that's what we should be doing in order to make sure that we can live with the code rules that are set out and enforced. In this case, we're told they're going to be enforced by the fire marshal.
Members don't have any problem supporting expenditures to make sure the buildings are safe. But we are not convinced that these two buildings should be renovated, and I think that it's time that we took another look at it and maybe spend a little more time deciding whether or not they are needed in Fort Smith. Members are going to probably be more easily persuaded that replacement is the way to go, rather than rehabilitating them. I think what we should be considering instead, is forgetting about these projects that show rehabbing the Green House Apartments, take another look at that issue. If the department needs to come back to this House for supplementary funds to deal with the safety issues that have been identified by the fire marshal, then I think that Members will be inclined to support that. But based on the discussions we've had to date, Mr. Chairman, I'm going to make a motion to delete the $149,000 that is shown for the Green House Apartments for this, and encourage the department to come with a plan that demonstrates to us why we should be rehabilitating instead of looking at replacing, and having that sort of discussion with the Members.