NATURE

Sea, land, river

PEOPLES

Community

For earlier materials see Table of Contents

April 29^th	Circus in town
	+ all candidates meeting

Tomorrow’s write up on City Council meeting

First impressions of debate/ questions

Gary Coons –Emphasis on his opposition to IPPs and fish farming ‘theme ‘take back the North’

Herb Pond: ‘Bring back the Bacon’ theme

Lisa Girbav: The planet is at risk --- survival over profitability is the question

And a lone voice from audience

This woman at end demanded to be heard --- Pond was first to try to calm her, reason with her etc – highlighting his people skills

Along same lines Pond emphasized his ability to work with people --- thus ideology did not matter, just results – he gave as example the last City Council which had wide diversity of opinion but in the end were able to come to decisions that ‘worked’ for all the members ---

Well perhaps – but I would suggest Democracy was the loser for expediency – ‘we’, the public were not privy to the reasons for decisions – just the ‘Results’ --- I will return to this theme later using ‘Communities in Bloom’ grant cut as an example – contrasted with 30T$ for 2010 Centennial planning.

User Pays?

Council wants to reduce property taxes by shifting more expenses to ‘Users’ – here the Mall (as did McDonald’s etc) cleaned their parking lot of last winter’s gravel by using city water instead of brooms --- the latter used a couple of 1 inch hoses working for several hours --- contrast this with a recent article in Vancouver paper suggesting to home owners that fixing a leaky faucet would pay for itself in saved water usage fees – which implies a metering system – if these businesses were actually paying for the amount of water they used, I suspect they would find another way of cleaning up their parking lots


	More signs of the times

NATURE

PEOPLES

For earlier materials see Table of Contents

Circus in town