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Round up the conspirators

Thank goodness they didn’t call it a perfect storm. “Conspiracy of events,” is how Mayor Kenny referred to it.
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Thank goodness they didn’t call it a perfect storm.

“Conspiracy of events,” is how Mayor Kenny referred to it. I’m not sure what that tells us about Ken but the armchair psychologist in me managed to be amused and distracted for a few moments — okay, to be honest, I was looking for any reason to procrastinate on a deadline — by the image of Ken as a conspiracy theorist. It builds neatly on the one-against-many role he played for so many years as a lone voice of reason on council.

But I’ll be truly heartened if we manage to get through Friday evening’s Dialogue Café on the muni’s belt-bustin’ budget without someone invoking the perfect storm cliché, a phrase grown trite and irritating by witless politicians invoking it to obfuscate their own culpability in budgetary excesses.

According to conventional wisdom around muni hall, there are three culprits masterminding this conspiracy: the province, the GVRD and garbage. Readers who are paying any attention at all may be rubbing their eyes in disbelief right now. But let us suspend disbelief for a moment and run with conventional wisdom.

The province cut, perhaps, $2.5 million bucks out of Whistler’s budget when they pandered to taxpayers instead of hotels and came down on the side of suckers who’d purchased overpriced condos. They ruled against continuing to gouge some property owners when they refused to create a new, blended tax classification for strata “hotels.” While there’s no doubt the privately-owned condo dressed in hotel clothing — the backbone of Whistler’s accommodation sector — is neither commercial nor residential, creating a third classification overtaxed their tiny minds. Given a choice of sticking it to Whistler or continuing to stick it to condo owners, they ruled in a way many thought was predictable.

One might argue staff and council should have seen it coming and planned accordingly but then, one might as well be wishing pigs could fly. No government ever plans for decreases in tax revenues; they simply react to it.

The GRVD’s contribution to our budgetary mess is all about what the various municipalities downvalley settled on their staff. Whistler plays Simon Says when it comes to wages and pays staff accordingly. That’s but one reason so many people wish they had muni jobs. While I don’t begrudge staff a nickel of their pay, there are many Whistleratics who wish they lived here and earned as though they lived in the Lower Mainland. Based on some of their remarks, they begrudge staff’s pay rate more than enough to make up for my forbearance on the subject.

The final conspirators are the new waste transfer station and the new composting facility. We need a new waste transfer station because the Olympic athletes and, after them, Whistler’s workerbees need the neighbourhood formerly known as the dump for their new home. We need a new composting facility because, well, we didn’t have an old composting facility. Kermit nailed it when he said it’s hard being green.

That’s the official line. We’ll see what some of the rest of the townsfolk think on Friday but personally, I think we’ve let a few conspirators slip through our security net.

The Olympics, for example. Maybe it’s just my warped perception of the quadrennial exercise in wretched excess but I’m pleasantly surprised to discover all the primping and preening and gussying up we’ve been doing for the Olympics hasn’t contributed, in some small way, to our budgetary woes. I guess I owe the Games an apology. It’s nice to know there actually is such a thing as a free lunch.

I’m not particularly surprised no one mentioned the “Whistler Standard” and its contribution to our shortfall; it seems to be our very own elephant in the parlour. It has played and will continue to play a support role in our profligate spending in two ways. Capital budgetwise because everything costs more when we’re aiming for top drawer and operationally because, let’s face it, a roof is a roof unless it requires a small army of gardeners and landscaping crew to maintain it instead of, well, no attention at all between putting it on and replacing it at the end of its useful life.

Most notably, however, the main conspirator to avoid detection seems to be our current council’s inability to take a pass on anything that comes to their attention. With the exception of the hilariously runaway reno budget for muni hall, they haven’t nixed a single project. Worse yet, they seem to have adopted an imperial attitude that they really don’t need to pay attention to spending proposals deemed chump change or, in the vernacular of a time gone by, small potatoes.

Case in point, the Nesters Road compactor reno. Council couldn’t be bothered with this retrograde project because it cost — depending on who you talk to — a mere hundred grand… or hundred sixty-eight grand… or quarter of a million. Because it was chump change, no one seems to have looked at the plans and said, “Functionally, this doesn’t make any sense,” which it doesn’t.

It isn’t much in the overall budget. It doesn’t have the glam factor of big-ticket capital projects. It isn’t an Olympic legacy. Tourists won’t comment on it. It definitely isn’t a live site. But it is indicative of a very cavalier, spendthrift attitude towards your dough and mine. And that makes it disturbing.

But hey, this budget stuff is confusing. Between capital, operating, old hotel tax and new hotel tax, this is stuff you and I can’t really understand, or so I’ve been told. That doesn’t, apparently, let us off the hook when it comes to paying for it. It does, however, give us standing Friday evening to comment on it. I trust many of you will take advantage of the opportunity and show up at the GLC at 7 p.m.

 

* * * *

I don’t like to stop abruptly to address unrelated issues. But I have to because time’s running out. It’s running out on the comment period for a heliski operation proposed for what has been a prime, local backcountry skiing area.

Coast Range Heliskiing is applying for tenure to areas around Duffey Lake. The proposal includes virtually all the easy-access trekking area off the Duffey Lake Road: Steep Creek, Common Johnny Creek, Elliot Creek, Haylmore Creek. It would seriously degrade the backcountry experience one may enjoy at the ACC’s Wendy Thompson hut.

Given the Campbell government’s record of handing out backcountry tenures like salted peanuts, the only hope of having these areas eliminated from this tenure proposal is to deluge it with letters of opposition.

Touring is open to everyone; heliskiing to those few who can afford it. It’s a big province. This little part of it should remain heli-free.

The case # is 3411014. E-mail should be addressed to Andy Oetter, Adventure Tourism Manager at andy.oetter@gov.bc.ca . The deadline for comments is Nov. 22.