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The Whistler Standard

Yikes! Those are some ugly signs.
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Yikes! Those are some ugly signs.

How ugly are those signs, you ask? Well, if they’d been erected by anyone other than VANOC or whatever arm of VANOC is in charge of ugly signage, Whistler’s bylaw officers would have had them chainsawed to the ground and carted off to wherever a community without a landfill carts things off to by now.

You’ve seen the signs, haven’t you? I don’t know if that was a rhetorical question or simply a dumb one. OF COURSE YOU’VE SEEN THE SIGNS. Blind men could see the signs. I half suspect blind men designed the signs. Certainly no sighted man with any designs on designing would have and no woman of any visual persuasion would ever be responsibility for anything that garish.

But if you generally travel to the village by way of single-track bike trails you might have missed them. They’re big, they’re blue, they’re bellicose, they’re visually polluting, they’re obviously not in step with Whistler’s tastefully draconian sign bylaw, they’re ugly as sin and they’re self-congratulatory in much the same way an adolescent boy is when he gets his first unexpected hard-on. Wow! Look at the size of this baby!

Is the size and complete lack of visual appeal of the signs somehow meant to compensate for the fact you can’t really see any of the Olympic venues as you drive along the highway? Would they have been more tasteful if the white elephants were close against traffic like Canada Olympic Park outside Calgary? Isn’t it enough we’re going to get stuck with the Olympic Sliding Centre when the circus leaves town? Do we really have to put up with these abominations for the next three years?

Ohmigod. I just had a chilling thought. Are these devil-spawn signs meant to stay up after the Olympics? Told you that was a chilling thought.

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang — a book that’s taken over 30 years to be made into a movie, assuming it finally gets made this summer — opens with a whacked-out, enviroactivist surgeon and his assistant chainsawing monster billboards to the ground along the interstate north of my old home town, Albuquerque, New Mexico. In a dilettantish sort of way, it’s the character’s own contribution to monkeywrenching.

Hmmm….

But I digress.

Maybe the smoke and mirrors reports released by VANOC on what a bright, rosy future awaits Whistler after 2010 are in some way supposed to compensate for — or perhaps distract from — the signage erections. Now, as Mr. Barnett illuminated at the other end of Pique last week, if they’d just explain how CODA, the Calgary Olympic Development Association, is going to roll over and play dead while the centre of Olympic gravity shifts west, those reports may have some greater relevance to our own post-2010 future.

The truth, as most of the truly sustainable people who kept asking why we were going to build all new Olympic facilities instead of simply recycling ones Canada already had, is it won’t. Calgary will still be the national training centre for ski jumping, sliding, et. al. , and Canmore will still have as many people on skinny skis as they do in cars. The best we can hope for is a legacy that includes dismantling the ski jumps in the Callaghan and selling the Sliding Centre on eBay for whatever we can get for it. The X-country trails we can use and the Dave Murray Downhill, once it’s returned to general use by the skiing public, will be worth keeping.

But the signs have to go.

After all, they don’t really fit the Whistler Standard, do they? Then again, neither do I, I suspect. Truth is, I’m not exactly certain what the Whistler Standard is and I’d like to have a chat with Brian Barnett, RMOW’s general manager of all things Environmental to get his take on it.

Brian seems to have a handle on it, at least in a Justice Potter Stewart kind of way. Potter Stewart was a learned Supreme Court justice back in the days when the U.S. Supreme Court used to be in the Constitution protection biz. In a case dealing with pornography, he very insightfully opined that smut was one of those things that was probably incapable of adequate definition but nonetheless, he knew it when he saw it. It was one of those profound statements that sounds incredibly dumb… but isn’t.

Brian — and I’m not picking on Brian, this is a phenomenon that genuinely interests me and ought to interest you — has seen Whistler Transit’s buses and he knows they don’t meet the Whistler Standard. They’re a bit run down, a bit worn out, a little frayed around the edges. They should be; they’re worked like borrowed mules. One might, from a truly sustainable point of view, argue Whistler buses ought to look like they’re ridden hard and put away wet. It’s a sign of high ridership, enlightened commuting, a caring-sharing community. After all, bright and shiny buses are one of two things: new or unused.

But bright and shiny seems to be one element of the Whistler Standard. Overdone and pretentious may be others; I’m not certain. I do know whenever I’ve suggested turning the Muni works yard into an “affordable” trailer park, certain councillors curl their lips in a sneer, shake their heads in disgust and tell me, “It’s just not done, Old Chap. Not the Whistler Standard, don’tcha know.”

I know when I suggested the sludgehockey arena ought to be built to resemble that most iconic Canadian symbol of community, a Quonset hut arena, I received much the same answer. Not the Whistler Standard. That it could have been built for roughly one-tenth of the Island in the Sun option and would have given us massive, curved acreage to sell off as billboards — roughly as visually appealing as the Olympic signs but at least we’d be earning some income off ’em — and might have made us appear more like just one of the regular guys, communitywise, fell on deaf ears. Not the Whistler Standard.

But I’m a little worried the Whistler Standard might just bankrupt us in the not-so long run. The province just sliced a couple of million bucks off the property tax rolls. We’re quickly becoming addicted to a source of funds — hotel tax — that is not nearly as stable as property tax. Remember your recent history? We’re building up an infrastructure that’ll suck up tax dollars like smack sucks up everything a junkie can steal. And, as the very capable acting mayor, Mr. McKeever said, “We haven’t really had a chance to formulate a strategy,” to deal with the funding shortfall.

Well, here’s a couple of suggestions: Drop the Whistler Standard nonsense, fine VANOC for those hideous signs, reexamine the budget like you were spending your own money, and resist the temptation to just download the whole mess by jacking up property taxes.

I can’t define unsustainable… but I know it when I see it.