North Cowichan council has a long list of issues it wants to talk to the province about at the next meeting of the Union of B.C. Municipalities that will be held in Vancouver in September.
At the council meeting on June 18, Mayor Rob Douglas said CAO Ted Swabey, staff and himself came up with a number of important topics that should be discussed with government officials, and asked if council agreed with them and what they wanted to add.
One is street disorder and homelessness in the community which, Douglas said, council did discuss with the premier several years ago, and it’s hoped another meeting can be arranged with Premier David Eby and/or other government ministers at the UBCM on the issue.
Coun. Becky Hogg agreed that street disorder should be a hot topic for North Cowichan at the UBCM.
“It seems you have to keep repeating yourself [on this issue] but you have to,” she said. “So I think it’s important that we continue to push for some help with street disorder.”
Douglas said the municipality should also put a strong emphasis on treatment recovery for addictions at the UBCM.
“Obviously, with the province having its own fiscal challenges, we have to temper our expectations in terms of what kind of investments they are going to make, but we have some momentum on that file and it would be nice to see what we can get out of the UBCM meeting on that,” he said.
Douglas said another issue that should be discussed at the UBCM is the fact that the province won’t help pay for aeration methods in efforts to deal with Quamichan Lake’s ongoing problem with toxic blue-green algae blooms.
“Quamichan Lake is a long-standing issue that we need to bring up at the UBCM in recognition of the fact that we’re setting aside taxpayers’ funds every year for the aeration system while other communities across the province have these costs covered by the province, like at Elk Lake and Beaver Lake,” he said.
Another item that Douglas said is important to discuss with the province is funding for the Joint Utility Board's Outfall Relocation Project.
The cost of the project, which will see a new pipe built from the Joint Utility Board’s sewage treatment plant near Duncan to the proposed new outfall location in Satellite Channel, outside of Cowichan Bay, has ballooned from $27.4 million in 2016 when it was first planned to $95 million as of last February.
“The costs are significantly higher than we ever imagined and way beyond what we can pay for as a municipality, or our partners, like the City of Duncan, can cover,” Douglas said.
“The purpose of that meeting would be to request that the province provide assistance with the infrastructure costs. The province is in a tough fiscal environment so we’re probably not going to get what we want, but it’s worth a try.”
Douglas said ongoing challenges in North Cowichan’s forestry sector, including its pulp and saw mills, is also a priority topic that should be discussed with the province.
“We’ve talked to the forest minister in the past and we should highlight it again at the UBCM, especially recognizing the challenges at the Chemainus sawmill that just started its curtailment [on June 18],” he said.
“Another issue is the ongoing challenges with the Chemainus wells and their long-term licensing that we discussed at the UBCM at previous occasions.”
Coun. Chis Istace said North Cowichan’s infrastructure challenges should also be discussed at the UBCM.
Swabey told council in March that there were more than 370 development applications in progress in North Cowichan at the time, representing more than 10,000 new housing units, but North Cowichan has the capacity to service only 4,200 new units due to inadequate infrastructure.
“We can’t do anything in North Cowichan without new infrastructure, like water and sewer, so we can’t achieve the [housing] objectives the province wants,” Istace said.
Other issues that council agreed to emphasize at the UBCM are the downloading of the costs of E-Comm 911 to the municipality, the fact that the province has scrapped plans for a new pedestrian overpass that was proposed to be constructed across the Trans-Canada Highway between Beverly Street and James Street/York Road, and the long-delayed upgrades at the Crofton ferry terminal.
