I have been asked numerous times to name the big issues facing council going into 2015,
The truthful answer is we don’t know what all of them will be and, as we saw from last week’s snow event, some issues just sneak up on you.
Leading contenders will be the 2015 budget, the KGHM Ajax project and the performing-arts centre.
The 2015 budget will define how this new council will approach fiscal responsibility over the next four years.
We will need to find a balance between industry, business and residential-property owners.
We also need to find that balance between user fees and property taxation. What service levels are we comfortable with and what, if any, supplemental or legacy projects are we prepared to support?
As it stands today, preliminary numbers look good, but they are exactly that — preliminary. We need to finalize our 2014 expenditures, we need to see what happened to property assessments, we need to find out our gas-tax allocation and we need to calculate inflation on our existing services.
It is only then that we will be in a position to make decisions respecting a laundry list of supplementary budget requests and come up with a tax rate all of our stakeholders can live with.
Stay tuned.
Work on this critical issue started in December and will carry on until April.
It will likely be April when KGHM gets around to releasing some of the extensive work it has undertaken in support of its Ajax project.
The environmental-assessment process will kick into high gear and adjudication of KGHM’s work will be the focus of the community and of council.
While most of the proposed project is located outside the city boundary, it will be carefully scrutinized by council on behalf of our residents.
Groundwater hydrology, air quality, noise, dust, vibration, transportation, employment and taxation are a few of the issues we raised as far back as 2012.
In good faith, we owe the company a fair and transparent review of the answers they are providing to questions we have asked.
It is very likely that review will require several months to complete and will take us to September.
I suspect by then the third major issue of the year will be on our desks — the vision of a performing-arts centre.
While much work is underway, it will take the arts community some time to fully analyze the consultant’s input and be in a position to put a concrete proposal before the citizens of Kamloops.
How big is it? Where is it? Does it involve the university or the school district or the regional district? Is the private sector involved?
Done right, this could be a facility that defines the future of arts and, therefore, livability in Kamloops. Done wrong, this could be an albatross around the necks of the next generation of taxpayers in our city.
It is clear to me that for this to work, the entire arts community must share the vision and be prepared to work in unison to convince residents of the value.
This is a partial list of issues at best. That is part of the excitement of serving on city council.
Each week there are new problems, new opportunities and new thinking that we, as your agents, get to ponder, review and make decision upon.
Do we always get it right?
Not likely but, hopefully, with open minds and fulsome discussion, we can be right a majority of the time.
Ken Christian is a Kamloops councillor. Council columns appear monthly in KTW and online at kamloopsthisweek.com.Christian can be reached by email at kchristian@kamloops.ca. To comment on this column, email editor@kamloopsthisweek.com.
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