Directors Don't "Manage"

They acquiesce...

Originally submitted to The Morning Star as a letter to the editor, this letter is more appropriate for the blog, and was withdrawn.

Do people really believe that every little community in BC is suddenly filtering water to comply with the Water Act and new Health regulations to limit liability since Walkerton Ontario?  Ask Revelstoke and Kamloops how they got water treatment plants (albeit not filtration) when their residents rejected water referendums.

Whether it’s the rates charged for effluent—or potable—water in the North Okanagan, today’s issues have been building for years because Directors of the water administration of our North Okanagan Communities of Coldstream, Vernon, and Areas B & C through the Regional District do not direct, they acquiesce to bureaucrats.  And for acclaimed Coldstream mayor—and water advisory committee director—Garlick to now state that the water referendum is “educational” is a flagrant insult to all residents who are paying for it.

The problem is that Directors comprise an “Advisory” (vs. Management) Committee.  The first step always in effecting change is to ascertain what went wrong.  Because committee membership is chiefly tied to election terms (3 years; now 4), annexation disputes remove focus and don’t allow members to see beyond their elected term(s).  

Change the name from Advisory to Greater Vernon Management Committee; rewrite their mandate.   Directors need to veto plans, unlike this committee of “advisors” who never veto bureaucrats.

Forget consultants.  We have extremely well-paid professional engineers at GVW whose duties should be to actually design what our “management” committee members have agreed are the “best practices” idea for this area.  They get paid for those skills; not to hire consulting engineers.    

The second step is for Directors to realize that Councillor Kiss has the best practices, to TOTALLY separate water allocations from domestic/potable water.  Unchlorinated unfiltered raw water would be used for outdoor use (golf courses, parks, school playgrounds, turf farms, orchards and vineyards), which complies with the single category allocation they bought and paid for.  Councillor Kiss says the cost of expensive treatment would entirely disappear.

My little 9-hole golf course, Highlands, was built because I had a raw water (non potable) allocation from our 1,100 apple tree operation and no provision existed to sell it back if it wasn’t being used once farming was discontinued.  The golf course is now irrigated with chlorinated water—soon to be “filtered” too—because raw water wasn’t available after Duteau was built.  I was paying 500 per cent more for water, while today using less than 20 per cent of my paid-up allocation.  A 1,000 per cent increase since the orchard was planted.   Meanwhile GVW could re-sell my unused allocation to someone else! 

Only bureaucrats—free from requisite “direction” from directors—could have created that, and working backwards from the revenue they want, comprising myriad categories and six-pages of prices.  

"There could be 40 engineers working on this," offers Kia, "and it would only become a larger fiasco."