It has been a little over a year since Whistler locals were summoned to the polls to vote for their municipal representatives.
A lot has happened since then, when Mayor Jack Crompton took 69 per cent of all votes cast for the resort’s top elected position, while all four incumbent councillors were successful in their re-election campaigns, occupying the top four of six slots on council.
The message from voters in 2022 was that the community was largely content with the way things were going, choosing experience and familiarity at the tail-end of a pandemic that effectively ground Whistler’s tourism industry to a halt.
A year into the term, Pique sat down with Crompton to check in on how things are going so far.
“I think it's important to recognize that we’re all coming through a once-in-a-generation event,” he said of the COVID-19 pandemic “Below the surface of everything is a rebuild and recovery project that I don’t think we can overlook.”
Crompton’s 2022 campaign was launched with a focus on three areas: The ever present and all-consuming housing crisis, climate action, and visitation management.
Housing
On housing, he said the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) had been “aspirational in our approach,” noting that the local government had been working to up the pace on the delivery of affordable housing units, given it “remains our greatest challenge.”
That’s where flexibility (and a lot of what was learned during the pandemic) comes in to keep things moving, he said.
“One of the beliefs I had going into the election was we needed to move our delivery and our planning in parallel rather than wait until we had perfectly formulated what we would be doing over the next 30 years, so we had to continue to build.”
But what of results?
“We’ve had two Whistler Housing Authority buildings sold into the market—that's 100 families that have moved into homes that they own. We have two new rental apartment buildings that have roofs on. We are endeavouring to complete the next phase of Cheakamus Crossing by 2026, which will be a significant investment in housing this community,” he said, before casting further back to pre-pandemic Whistler for more numbers.
“In the past five years, a total of 596 employee bed units have been created across six projects. Once built out, Cheakamus Crossing Phase 2 is expected to add approximately 910 additional employee bed units. That’s work that isn’t happening in most communities around the province, so we all in this community stand on the shoulders of giants that have given us a foundation on which we all want to build more on.”
The housing file remains open on all levels of government, with the province wading in with new legislation earlier this month to give greater powers to local governments to enforce short-term rental bylaws and return them to the long-term market.
Although Whistler as a tourism resort is exempt from a key tenet of the new legislation, which requires homeowners to primarily live in the property they are renting on the short-term market, Crompton welcomed the legislation last week, saying it gives municipalities powers they’d wanted for a while.
Climate action
Crompton had a long list to read from for his second campaign focus: climate action. He listed the RMOW’s new bike share program, which returned this year; a return to transit loyalty program intended to entice bus riders back to the system after last year’s record-breaking public transit strike; a Whistler EV strategy; the Whistler Transit Future Action Plan; and more.
Of note was Meadow Park Sports Centre, which in 2022 accounted for 19 per cent of the RMOW’s greenhouse gas emissions—or 481 tonnes of carbon.
“This is a 34-per-cent increase when compared to 2021,” he said. “This is due to an increase in natural gas consumption at Meadow Park. We’re committed to doing something about that.”
That something was securing funding for a retrofit to improve the building’s efficiency, while reducing its reliance on natural gas.
For the most part, Crompton was listing off of the RMOW’s Big Moves Climate Action Implementation Strategy, a six-pillar climate mitigation to-do list.
“The six Big Moves came out of the Community Energy and Climate Action Plan, which was a significant community engagement process where we dug deep into what actions we needed to take to mitigate and adapt to changing climate, and those actions were prioritized as far as their highest return on energy and effort,” said Crompton.
“Those actions were installed into what you’ve seen us do, and what you will see us do.”
Visitor management
A third major focus of Crompton’s 2022 campaign was visitation management—that is, ensuring the tourism industry Whistler relies on brings value to the community without diminishing the quality of life of those who live here.
Crompton pointed to lessons learned and goodies earned from the 2010 Olympics as a major driver of value for the community in ensuring the municipality had the financial tools necessary to ensure the cost of tourism didn’t land on workers and residents, listing baked-in flexibility for the RMOW to use the various provincial funding streams resort communities can dip into.
“A great example of the work we’ve been doing around using these funds well is investments in municipal parks. Municipal parks are used by families that live and work here, and a lot of people spending time in the summer was diminishing the experience for our residents. It wasn’t well managed; it wasn’t well serviced,” he said. “If you look at the redesign of Rainbow Park, it’s been driven by aligning the park with the pressures of increasing visitation and climate change so it will be robust, resilient and engaging for years to come.”
Crompton talked of the importance of learning lessons from similar communities while staying innovative in a unique way for Whistler.
“We’re focused on how we improve on what our competitive set is doing. How do we make [Whistler] a better place to work than it is?” he asked.
“We have lots of things to be proud of in that regard,” he added, listing the Whistler Housing Authority, the Whistler Community Services Society, the Whistler Valley Housing Society, and the Whistler 2020 Development Corporation—“all of these have made us world leaders, but we also have a responsibility to continue to look at that competitive set and learn from them.”
Looking ahead to the rest of the term (there’s another three years to go before anyone gets to vote in an RMOW election after all), Crompton said housing was going to stay a top priority.
“Housing will remain No. 1 on my list and council’s list for the rest of this term. It is the most important investment of time and resources that we will make,” he said.
It’s not just all housing though, Crompton said regional transit would remain a focus too, but called it “the most frustrating issue I have dealt with in my political life.”
The RMOW, along with other local governments across the Sea to Sky, is seeking a transit link between Vancouver and Mount Currie—a long-term project Crompton said at the very least was building institutional connections between the municipalities.
“It has been really gratifying to work with Squamish, Pemberton, the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, Lil'wat Nation and Squamish Nation on aligning our vision on what that service looks like. If we ever realize that I think it will be an enormous victory from a transportation perspective, a climate perspective, and a tourism perspective. I intend to continue to push hard on regional transit,” he said.
“Promise made, promise not kept for a long time, but one that I continue to push hard on.”
Failed bid, built connections
Speaking of building connections, Crompton listed the now-defunct 2030 Olympic bid as a positive overall when it came to local efforts towards reconciliation.
“The RMOW deeply appreciated learning from the Lil’wat and Squamish host Nations through the 2030 bid process,” he said.
“It built a lot of relationships between our organizations that allowed for us to learn about how they do their work and what it means to be Indigenous-led,” he said. “Though it didn’t result in a bid for the 2030 Olympics, it certainly built a lot of important relationships. The process shows what's possible when we put reconciliation at the forefront of our work.”
What’s the score?
Asked to give himself a score for the year so far, Crompton again pivoted to giving RMOW staff two thumbs up, and gave high marks to council’s newest additions, Jessie Morden and Jeff Murl.
“Jeff and Jessie have been quick to add value. They have been incredibly engaged in their community, listening to the input that residents have for them, and they’ve been responsive. I am pretty sure I wasn’t as quick to that point as they’ve been, I have been really impressed,” he said.
He also gave credit to Councillor Jen Ford for her time as president of the Union of BC Municipalities in 2022-23, which he said had drawn in great benefits for the municipality through connections and input.
Much of his own self-assessment came alongside praise for municipal staff, who he said were applying lessons learned through the pandemic to be flexible and dynamic. For himself, he said he helped by giving the professionals the space they needed.
“Sometimes as politicians we’re quick to see what someone did wrong, rather than to give those people the space to see that mistake and learn from it and improve the organization overall,” he said.
