Things appear to be in complete disarray over at Metro Vancouver.
At last week's meeting of the waste committee, Commissioner Johnny Carline did the same thing he did several years ago when he was trying to steer through a 100-year landfill in Ashcroft without public support. He suddenly laid on politicians a recommendation that seemed to completely contradict all his previous advice.
In both cases, politicians were put in a very awkward position. They were confused, divided, and incapable of governing confidently.
In the earlier instance Carline called an unscheduled meeting of the waste committee (December 7, 2004). There was only one item on the agenda: a last-minute recommendation during the environmental assessment process (EAO) to add a second liner to the proposed landfill at an additional cost of $20 million, even though politicians had been assured all along that a single liner would suffice. Here is what I recorded as the comment by Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan:
"I don’t like being ambushed like this at such a late stage here in the EAO process. These are exactly the kinds of decisions that I don’t want to make at the last minute. If the science-based decision was right, then I don’t want to spend $20 million just for political reasons. There is no way we’ll satisfy the opponents of the landfill with this. This action could be used by the opponents as evidence that the costs will be more than we thought for the landfill. If the science-based decision was wrong, then why didn’t staff bring it to us earlier? Why couldn’t staff provide an accurate budget earlier. Maybe we should be evaluating whether the project should go forward at all."
Pitt Meadows' Don Maclean also voted against Carline's recommendation.
When the recommendation went to the Metro Board later that month, it provoked more anguished discussion and then failed. The Board actually voted against their CAOs recommendation.
Last week, after piles of "scientific" evidence supporting the development of an in-region incinerator, Carline suddenly recommended to the waste committee that the plan be amended to allow an out-of-region incinerator as a back-up option.
Again, there was much confusion at the table. Read about it in Jeff Nagel's coverage for Black Press.
No wonder the Minister intervenes!
Showing posts with label Pitt Meadows Don Maclean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pitt Meadows Don Maclean. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Metro Board's embarrassing exploitation of the gentle Chief Pasco
Today's meeting of the Metro Board was a study in what's wrong with governance in our region.
The first thing the Board did was to retreat behind closed doors. For an hour and a half the rest of us -- several local citizens and a much larger group of people from First Nations communities as far away as Fort St. John -- milled awkwardly in the lobby waiting to be re-admitted to the Board Room.
At quarter to eleven, the doors were re-opened and Nlaka'pamux Nation Tribal Council Chief Bob Pasco was admitted to the microphone. Pasco has sat in that chair many times, and over many years, speaking out against Metro's earlier plan to build a 100-year dump in Ashcroft. On those occasions, the Board gave him a patient hearing and then directed staff to continue doing just that.
This time Chief Pasco was invited to appear before the Board.
They gave him all the time he wanted to speak from the heart about what the land means to him and his community and future generations, and to invite one patient articulate First Nations speaker after another to take a turn at the mike. (Only Don Maclean from Pitt Meadows spoiled the moment by asking the Chair at one point how much longer this would go on and then sitting back and fuming in his chair until it was over.)
At the end of the delegation, Pasco noted that "there's a difference after all these years." In earlier times, he said, the message he picked up in the Metro building was "you don't belong here." But now "things have changed."
What has changed? Merely that Pasco is now a convenient tool in Metro's petty turf war with the provincial government, a totally trivial non-issue that has eclipsed all matters of public interest in deliberations about the future of our region's waste.
It turns out that the Board laboured so mightily behind those closed doors this morning to issue forth a long-winded motion that Metro send a delegation to Victoria.
What really has the Board's knickers in a knot -- the "elephant in the room" as Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan called it -- is the infuriating fact that Victoria approved the Cache Creek landfill permit extension while rejecting an essentially identical facility in Ashcroft. It was Corrigan who noted that Victoria's high-handed interference in Metro affairs was lubricated by paid lobbyists working for entities with a "financial interest" in the matter.
It was gruesomely clear in the discussion that followed that some on that Board appear to be more worried about the public money lost when Ashcroft was turned down than about the disdain for First Nations they would rightly have been accused of if it had gone ahead. Pasco's lessons had clearly fallen on deaf ears.
Corrigan I feel sure spoke for many on that Board when he expressed the view that recycling has "reached the point of diminishing returns." We should just get on with it, Directors kept saying, and build a landfill, or an incinerator, "or whatever" -- because, after all, we're in a desperate situation.
In a desperate situation to find someone's airshed or someone's traditional territory -- whatever -- to get rid of a problem that, after all, we can't do anything about.
After the meeting I went up to Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore and asked him how things are going with their food scraps program. He said he's still taking lots of heat from citizens, but it's mainly about switch from weekly to bi-weekly garbage pickups.
Unlike Mayor Moore, who is not afraid to wade in and take political heat for helping his community get their waste on a diet, the rest of the politicians on that Board -- to a person -- seem ready to cave to the troglodyte element in every community who feel that wasting is an entitlement: "I pay my taxes," they hear, "now you clean it up or we'll remember you at election time."
The first thing the Board did was to retreat behind closed doors. For an hour and a half the rest of us -- several local citizens and a much larger group of people from First Nations communities as far away as Fort St. John -- milled awkwardly in the lobby waiting to be re-admitted to the Board Room.
At quarter to eleven, the doors were re-opened and Nlaka'pamux Nation Tribal Council Chief Bob Pasco was admitted to the microphone. Pasco has sat in that chair many times, and over many years, speaking out against Metro's earlier plan to build a 100-year dump in Ashcroft. On those occasions, the Board gave him a patient hearing and then directed staff to continue doing just that.
This time Chief Pasco was invited to appear before the Board.
They gave him all the time he wanted to speak from the heart about what the land means to him and his community and future generations, and to invite one patient articulate First Nations speaker after another to take a turn at the mike. (Only Don Maclean from Pitt Meadows spoiled the moment by asking the Chair at one point how much longer this would go on and then sitting back and fuming in his chair until it was over.)
At the end of the delegation, Pasco noted that "there's a difference after all these years." In earlier times, he said, the message he picked up in the Metro building was "you don't belong here." But now "things have changed."
What has changed? Merely that Pasco is now a convenient tool in Metro's petty turf war with the provincial government, a totally trivial non-issue that has eclipsed all matters of public interest in deliberations about the future of our region's waste.
It turns out that the Board laboured so mightily behind those closed doors this morning to issue forth a long-winded motion that Metro send a delegation to Victoria.
What really has the Board's knickers in a knot -- the "elephant in the room" as Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan called it -- is the infuriating fact that Victoria approved the Cache Creek landfill permit extension while rejecting an essentially identical facility in Ashcroft. It was Corrigan who noted that Victoria's high-handed interference in Metro affairs was lubricated by paid lobbyists working for entities with a "financial interest" in the matter.
It was gruesomely clear in the discussion that followed that some on that Board appear to be more worried about the public money lost when Ashcroft was turned down than about the disdain for First Nations they would rightly have been accused of if it had gone ahead. Pasco's lessons had clearly fallen on deaf ears.
Corrigan I feel sure spoke for many on that Board when he expressed the view that recycling has "reached the point of diminishing returns." We should just get on with it, Directors kept saying, and build a landfill, or an incinerator, "or whatever" -- because, after all, we're in a desperate situation.
In a desperate situation to find someone's airshed or someone's traditional territory -- whatever -- to get rid of a problem that, after all, we can't do anything about.
After the meeting I went up to Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore and asked him how things are going with their food scraps program. He said he's still taking lots of heat from citizens, but it's mainly about switch from weekly to bi-weekly garbage pickups.
Unlike Mayor Moore, who is not afraid to wade in and take political heat for helping his community get their waste on a diet, the rest of the politicians on that Board -- to a person -- seem ready to cave to the troglodyte element in every community who feel that wasting is an entitlement: "I pay my taxes," they hear, "now you clean it up or we'll remember you at election time."
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