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Pique N Your Interest

Two cents and change
andrewbyline

Issues are piling up in the floor like so much sweaty snowboard gear in the rush of winter, and you can only hold your nose for so long before taking them out for an airing.

Instead of focusing on just one topic this week, I thought I would use this opportunity to air my views on three topics that have been on my mind a lot lately.

Rainbow vs. Athletes Village

At the risk of finding burning bags of feces on my front porch, I think it’s time to permanently deep six the whole Rainbow subdivision idea. It’s too expensive to be effective as staff housing, which means we’ll probably end up building more market housing to subsidize the costs.

I know we need those bed units (I’m on the Whistler Housing Authority waitlist myself) but realistically we can probably expect to see about 100 new units on the market in the next few years with Nita Lake, Function Junction, and The Boot property coming online. We also are still resolving the whole Holborn-legacy issue, and that could add a few more beds to the mix right next to the village.

But the main reason for ix-naying Rainbow is the fact we’re also planning an athletes village. While also ludicrously expensive per square foot, we’re already committed to housing 2,800 athletes and coaches for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. With a significant boost in funding, we could turn most of those bed units into subsidized staff housing. We could even get WHA wait-listers to purchase the units in advance, making up for some of the shortfall, and find a private partner to build a dorm/hostel that they would take over after the Games.

Unlike Rainbow, the athletes village will have a park, a sports centre, and nearby services – Franz’s Trail in Creekside is still under-utilized. Who knows, one day the new neighbourhood might even have its own chairlift up the west side of Whistler Mountain.

All I’m saying is that there’s no need to build two villages when one is all we need.

Get moving on Lot 1/Lot 9

While I applaud the RMOW’s decision to solicit ideas from the public at a meeting last week (several years too late), Whistler is at a juncture where we need bold leadership and not more decisions by committee. We’re committed to building a Paralympic arena, so let’s build it – the longer we wait the more it’s going to cost. Maybe we can also relax our environmental and aesthetic requirements slightly in favour of a more practical design, and get it built for a little more than the $20 million provided.

I like the idea of a multi-use building, but Whistler has been burned in the past by trying to build facilities that are all things to all people. The more users, the more useless a thing becomes.

I don’t like to pick on Millennium Place here, but the fact is there were so many user groups involved from the start that the multi-use complex we ended up with is a glorified community centre – community theatre, showcasing local artists and photographers, a youth centre for local youth, a daycare for local parents, etc.

It doesn’t do a lot to help us attract tourists, like the venues at the Banff Centre for the Arts, or the venues for the Aspen Ideas Festival.

I always thought Whistler Village would be a great place to have an annual Shakespeare Festival, maybe hiring the troupe from the Bard on the Beach festival in Vancouver, but Whistler’s business and tourism community was too slow. Now it’s Whistler-Blackcomb’s project, and will take place outside the Roundhouse – far from local shops and restaurants.

Getting back to the point, maybe we could build a basic arena but come up with a way to make it modular – build the arena first, and add the other components as we can afford them and know exactly what we want. One thing at a time, especially when we’re working with a tight deadline.

Saturday night fever

No offence to all the local singer-songwriters and DJ’s doing their thing, but I don’t find there’s all that much to do here on a Saturday night when it comes to live entertainment. All the biggest bands seem to come here on weeknights, or on Sunday’s popular Punk Night at The Boot.

The problem is that I work Monday to Friday, as do a lot of other residents I know. We can’t always go out on Sunday or Monday night to see bands because it can wreck the whole next day.

I realize we get a lot of the runoff from Vancouver and Seattle – bands play the bigger city venues on Saturdays and come up to Whistler after that – but there has to be a way to improve the Saturday night music scene here. The GLC and Boot sometimes come through, but not enough for my tastes.

I love live music. Whenever I defend Toronto, my city of origin, I always talk up the music scene. Usually the problem on Saturday nights is that there are too many bands to see.

On behalf of all the Monday to Friday residents, and all the tourists who spend Saturday nights looking for something to do after waiting two hours to get into a restaurant, let’s get some more Saturday night shows happening.

I also encourage the RMOW to ease its restrictions on buskers, and have a few more music festivals at the base of the mountains – if you want to put the life back in Whistler, maybe we need to put the "live" back first.

And finally:

Last week we discovered that the Whistler Events Bureau, or WEB, has changed its name to Events Whistler. For a town that likes its acronyms so much "EW" is a bad choice.