Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, we've been told on a number of occasions, do it from within in-house. We get told to go out to the private sector. So we try to accommodate as much as we can on both sides of the scale. I just believe no matter how much homework we do, it's not going to be enough for the Member.
The fact is, we do have people who monitor our assets, our lease arrangements. But the fact is also, we weren't counting on one of our leased facilities that houses four departments to be shut down because of structural reasons, and spread the rest of the departments over a number of spaces. You can talk to the staff within the community of where they're housed and they would tell you how unhappy they are in the places they were put. So we've had to, on occasion, go to older facilities and out to the private sector and they would renovate an older spot, and that's what we would have to take because that's what's available. Now we're in a position where we have to come up with new space. Whether it's lease-to-own leased or if it does get approved for capital program, that's something we now have to come up with a functional plan, a program that we could actually come up with some estimates and then go out to the private sector for an RFP or tender. Before we do that, we also would have to have that discussion around this table to see if we would use a leased program instead of the typical capital program that we enter into. So there's a fair bit of work that needs to be done.
The Department of Public Works and Services has four people in-house that right now deal with the functional program and review of all the projects that the client departments bring to us, and there's a four-month backlog on that. So if we want to do it in-house, then we would have to look at what other programs we bump to accommodate this. Because we don't have adequate office space, it would take priority over some other projects out there. That's why it's coming forward in this basis for additional funds. Thank you.
