This is in support of the recent letter submitted by Edith Schleiss and in response to the new pay scale for the Mayor and Counsellors scheduled for introduction in November.
I sympathize completely with the property “squeeze” being placed on local taxpayers in the Graceland area by a council now obsessed with resolving the housing crisis which has faced our community for years with no visible overall rezoning of larger tracts of land for either affordable or attainable solutions.
Don’t they read the weasel words regarding both in past OCP documents? In my opinion, it’s simply impossible to attract quality people to administer governance at $36,000 a year. What we elect are those that bask in the ambience of their “civic duty” and fail to grasp in any meaningful way the issues that are slowly eating the “reality” that they are crafting for us as a community.
Our “city managers” are, in effect, forcing us to live in a rural community of politically correct convenience at taxpayers’ expense, with social engineering such as bicycle lanes and narrowing streets that have turned a simple drive home or to town into a crap shoot.
Are we not the victim of a host of incredibly poor Council decisions such as the cost of adopting Duteau Creek as a water source when Okanagan Lake sits at our doorstep or the recent inability to deal with the entrenched drug culture that is slowly beginning to dominate 25th Avenue and leave endless needles, excrement and garbage in our midst?
To Edith, I would say we are simply the victims of shoddy governance and we need to attract and pay for quality individuals who have the credentials and time to deal with the complex issues that face our community. Instead, we elect a Council and Mayor who debate the “shopping cart” issue for six hours and leave us wondering how their resolution stems the tide of irresponsible and unresolved abuse of public property on 25th Avenue.
Well, Edith, you get what you pay for and currently you’re the victim of a Council trying to squeeze a square peg social housing issue into a round peg NIMBY hole. Come next election, prepare for some of the same.
Alan D. Wilson
