A response posted on Squamish Chief Website: We used to have a shadow council when I was first elected. They brought ideas and initiatives to council. I had suggested it for this term but it has not been enacted. This is an idea I have been espousing for a while and I look forward to the next council reinvigorating this initiative. This is a 2-way learning opportunity...we can learn a lot from the youth and we have some mentorship to impart as well. Unfortunately the format was not conducive to generating the responses that would help differentiate between mayoral candidates. Granted, with so many council candidates, it is a challenge to get enough airtime to make an impression. In the short mayors only session, we all given a few questions that we all answered but then we were all given different questions to answer along side the council candidates so it was hard to compare mayoral candidates when only one candidate is answering a certain question. I didnt get to answer the animal services question for example. The idea of an off leash dog area and dog parks has been around for many years. Ive brought it up before but it never seems to get the support of mayor and council to actually initiate it. Now we need to actually do something not just talk about it during a campaign. We need to license more dogs in town so we can support this service more robustly. RDOGS has come to council with a number of really achievable and creative ideas that council has endorsed including selling licenses at vets and pet stores and possibly setting up an incentive program for licensing. ie...you get a discount if your dog is licensed... Im told only 1 in 5 dogs in Squamish are licensed...not good enough. And Im always amazed at what the SPCA does with a minimal budget and a less than ideal space. The question about LNG was not actually a question about LNG. It was a question about possible other land uses at the proposed WLNG site. All council candidates stated the obvious that it is currently zoned Industrial and it is designated as such in the Official Community Plan. And that as we go through the OCP review this coming year, the community has an opportunity to envision all aspects of our community into the future. We were all agreeing on the facts. Thats probably a good thing;) Had a question actually been asked about WLNG and the proposed Fortis Pipeline expansion project, I suspect the answers from the candidates would have been quite different as has been demonstrated in the newspaper and in council chambers. In 2001 there was a Mayors only debate that gave the community an opportunity to really explore issues with the candidates and give the electorate a good idea about how a candidate thinks and what kind of leader they are. Lets bring that back in 2018.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 17:43:05 +0000
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