It did not take long. Barely a month after I complained bitterly about all the things going wrong on our Faire Isle, all new (or not so new) things keep cropping up.
RESIGNATIONS
January 1st. Or was it December 31st? CAO Kathy Lalonde resigns. Or at least that is how it is reported. But did she resign, or was she asked to resign, or was this overt or 'constructive' dismissal? I don't know, but the difference is that if the former, there is no severance pay, which could well be in the order of $200,000. Money or not aside, my heart goes out to Kathy. She has done a lot for Bowen, and represents the last of any continuous corporate memory that BIM has, save for Councillor Alison Morse and building department staff person Sandy Laudrum.
Which leads to 'resignation' #2, of Fire Chief Derek Dickson, effective January 31st. I had to check the spelling of his name, his having been around for so little time. He started last July, but 'stepped back' on paid leave in October. Now, with a report in from a legal task force team Southern, Butler, Price, the Chief will be 'retiring'. A nice euphemism.
The wording, as reported by the Undercurrent today (January 9th) is:
"While the Task Force found no cause for termination of Chief Dickson’s employment with BIM, one of the recommendations of the Task Force was to transition to new leadership of the department,”
Termination without cause means, yes, severance, and since Dickson will have been in his job for six months, that will presumably be due. But maybe he did just decide to retire.
Against these backdrops, one wonders just how well things are going at city hall. Just what prospects are there for moving forward on the new fire hall, given the reported tripling of costs from original estimates and referendum approval amount of $3 million?
COMMUNITY CENTRE PROCESS
And if that process is now a mess, what about the community centre? With WELL over $1 million spent on program, siting and design work, we still have not heard back from the federal government if the grant money to cover about $10 million of the $13-14 million total cost is going to come through or not. Problem is, if the answer is NO, the project simply can't move ahead. If YES, there will be need for another referendum, and given the current fire hall stasis, it would take a massive public relations campaign to convince Bowen Islanders to vote yes on such an undertaking.
If that referendum, should it happen, be unsuccessful, I think we would be looking at another decade before another stab could be taken at the project, save for a white knight riding out of the forest. I mean, really. In 1992, Don Nicholson drew up and costed a design at $4.8 million. That came after about a decade of commiserating and navel gazing.
A 1997 referendum for $750,000 to construct a small but adequate 6000 square foot community hall to be sited on the 'Library Lot' across from the Children's Centre on Carter Road failed on a close margin.
After incorporation, successive attempts were made to get the ball rolling, each costing money and not coming to fruition. Alan Boniface, for architectural firm Hotson Bakker prepared both a Snug Cove Master Plan and the derivative plans for a community centre in 2008. This got as far as concept drawings before being discarded in favour of the current version. Thirty plus years and counting, we remain without a centre, unique in all of BC for communities our size and even smaller.
CARDENA ROAD
Correctly this is 2019 project, but only now with school back and the small ferry on, do we see this fiasco in all its glory. So the venerable cherry tree in front of the library got cut down, having survived previous attempts on its life. For no apparent good. There is now an asphalt paved 10 foot plus sidewalk on the west side of Cardena that for all the world looks like another car traffic lane. The road asphalt is a forty feet swath. Gone is all the parking. The lovely large roundabout is hardly used; people simply continue to do a 'U' turn at the dropoff/pickup area. The school buses, which do use the roundabout, cannot navigate the diameter without driving over the curbs or doing a back-up manoeuvre. Plus, the elevation change is such that a bunch of steps are now needed to get to grade level of the library/gallery. Presumably grass will be planted on the embankment and a new path will meander along the bottom of it, but does that make it easy for people with mobility problems? Plainly, no- the opposite.
FERRY
I broached this before, querying why it is taking six weeks to do maintenance work on the Queen. I compared it to a $25+ million overhaul of the Oceania Regatta in North Vancouver this past fall, wherein the work was done in sixteen days using round the clock shifts with workers housed in an old cruise ship docked alongside, and a supply chain fully mobilized in advance. Maybe next time...
But meanwhile, why is it that we are being exhorted to not drive, but carpool, hitchhike, take the bus, yet the ferry is only haphazardly filled. I counted room on the Wednesday 4:35 pm badly overloaded sailing for at least four vehicles if they had not devoted two lanes to a cube van or unnecessarily left areas open behind the yellow hash marks in front of the stairs when small vehicles would easily have fit. That does not include the extra spots to be gleaned if ferry crew coaxed people to park more closely.
Speaking of which, why oh why does BCFS simply not abandon the schedule during the refit? The Bowen Queen makes the crossing in twelve minutes instead of twenty for the Cap. There are three berths at Horseshoe Bay, and while there would be delays loading/unloading there because of other ferry traffic, surely they could be running the ship continuously when there are overloads. Maybe next time....
CULPABILITY
Maybe it is unfair to assign blame. Let's just call it responsibility. But yes, that is what Council is for. That was one of the main reasons for incorporating. To have central, simplified coordination. We are not getting that. We are getting confusion and ill thought out initiatives that just aren't going anywhere.
Cheers. Welcome to the new decade.
Peter Frinton
