Time for a pop quiz on Dysfunction-By-The-Sea
Jack Knox, Columnist
Times Colonist,
May 29, 2014
Good morning, class. With the teachers and the province preoccupied with the latest chapter in their 100 Years War, it seemed a good time to fill the void with a pop quiz.
Question 1: Did Esquimalt’s NIMBY-ism just cost local taxpayers $500 million in government grants, or merely add tens of millions to the cost of the capital region’s stalled sewage treatment project?
Question 2: Would each of our other municipalities have also balked at having a sewage plant forced upon it by the others? (Hint: Probably.)
Question 3: Divide the amount of the potentially squandered sewage grants by the population Seaterra would serve. Would our perennially petty parochial politics cost every man, woman and child A) an extra $1,825 each, B) more, because you have to factor in financing and the cost of delays, or C) our sanity?
Question 4: The provincial government, the only body with the power to force Victoria’s municipal councils to work together, resolutely refuses to do so. This week it balked at forcing an end to the sewage stalemate. Last week it allowed the Regional Crime Unit to fall apart. It also doesn’t want to make politicians talk about amalgamation. In 50 words or less: What’s the point of a government that refuses to govern?
Question 5: If the dozen municipalities in Dysfunction-By-The-Sea are going to continue to duck the amalgamation question (even the suggestion of a debate is equated with treason), can they not at least come up with a way to settle disputes on issues of regional importance?
Certainly you can argue that amalgamation isn’t the answer. The sheer mechanics of it would be fraught with complications. How do you merge the fire departments employing unionized firefighters with those using volunteers? Victoria has backyard trash pickup, Saanich doesn’t, View Royal uses a private contractor and the other West Shore municipalities don’t provide garbage collection at all. Aggressively leafy Metchosin certainly doesn’t want an Anschluss with pro-development Langford and Colwood. And why would financially robust Langford, its coffers swollen from all that development, want to take on its poorer neighbours’ obligations?
Yet the status quo, a dozen little inwardly focused councils, leaves no one taking the broad view. The biggest traffic jam in the region would be eased by the mythical McKenzie Avenue interchange, yet it doesn’t get built in part because the people it most affects — the commuters inching in each day from Sooke, Langford, Metchosin, Colwood, View Royal, Highlands and up the Malahat — live in the wrong place.
There’s no political pressure on the councils of those communities to fix a bottleneck that exists in Saanich, and no political pressure on Saanich to solve a problem that mostly affects people who reside somewhere else.
Esquimalt is the poster child for or against amalgamation, depending on your perspective. In 2002, there was a huge fuss when it backed out of a deal to have Victoria take over fire protection.
More recently, its attempts to divorce the Victoria Police Department failed, though it did win its own dedicated patrol — cops who are supposed to confine themselves to the west side of the blue bridge. (In real life, police are faced with situations like Saturday’s tragedy in which a baby authorities believe was brought in from Esquimalt by bus was found dead in downtown Victoria. Common sense says VicPD needed to throw every available officer at that investigation, tracking potential witnesses before they disappeared from the city core.)
Esquimalt’s rejection of the CRD’s attempts to force it to accept a sewage plant will be celebrated by those who don’t think Esquimalt’s neighbours should be allowed to make it swallow a plan it finds unpalatable, and condemned by those who don’t think one little municipality should be permitted to hold the others hostage.
Complicating the mess is the divided opinion over whether we need sewage treatment at all, or, even if we do, whether the CRD’s plan would work.
The fact is, though, that the region is legally bound to provide treatment, and risks losing the federal and provincial funding — roughly two-thirds of the total cost — if it doesn’t get its act together soon.
And with a dozen little fiefdoms acting on their own, don’t hold your breath on that happening with sewage, policing, transportation or anything else.
© Copyright Times Colonist
Jack Knox, Columnist
Times Colonist,
May 29, 2014
Good morning, class. With the teachers and the province preoccupied with the latest chapter in their 100 Years War, it seemed a good time to fill the void with a pop quiz.
Question 1: Did Esquimalt’s NIMBY-ism just cost local taxpayers $500 million in government grants, or merely add tens of millions to the cost of the capital region’s stalled sewage treatment project?
Question 2: Would each of our other municipalities have also balked at having a sewage plant forced upon it by the others? (Hint: Probably.)
Question 3: Divide the amount of the potentially squandered sewage grants by the population Seaterra would serve. Would our perennially petty parochial politics cost every man, woman and child A) an extra $1,825 each, B) more, because you have to factor in financing and the cost of delays, or C) our sanity?
Question 4: The provincial government, the only body with the power to force Victoria’s municipal councils to work together, resolutely refuses to do so. This week it balked at forcing an end to the sewage stalemate. Last week it allowed the Regional Crime Unit to fall apart. It also doesn’t want to make politicians talk about amalgamation. In 50 words or less: What’s the point of a government that refuses to govern?
Question 5: If the dozen municipalities in Dysfunction-By-The-Sea are going to continue to duck the amalgamation question (even the suggestion of a debate is equated with treason), can they not at least come up with a way to settle disputes on issues of regional importance?
Certainly you can argue that amalgamation isn’t the answer. The sheer mechanics of it would be fraught with complications. How do you merge the fire departments employing unionized firefighters with those using volunteers? Victoria has backyard trash pickup, Saanich doesn’t, View Royal uses a private contractor and the other West Shore municipalities don’t provide garbage collection at all. Aggressively leafy Metchosin certainly doesn’t want an Anschluss with pro-development Langford and Colwood. And why would financially robust Langford, its coffers swollen from all that development, want to take on its poorer neighbours’ obligations?
Yet the status quo, a dozen little inwardly focused councils, leaves no one taking the broad view. The biggest traffic jam in the region would be eased by the mythical McKenzie Avenue interchange, yet it doesn’t get built in part because the people it most affects — the commuters inching in each day from Sooke, Langford, Metchosin, Colwood, View Royal, Highlands and up the Malahat — live in the wrong place.
There’s no political pressure on the councils of those communities to fix a bottleneck that exists in Saanich, and no political pressure on Saanich to solve a problem that mostly affects people who reside somewhere else.
Esquimalt is the poster child for or against amalgamation, depending on your perspective. In 2002, there was a huge fuss when it backed out of a deal to have Victoria take over fire protection.
More recently, its attempts to divorce the Victoria Police Department failed, though it did win its own dedicated patrol — cops who are supposed to confine themselves to the west side of the blue bridge. (In real life, police are faced with situations like Saturday’s tragedy in which a baby authorities believe was brought in from Esquimalt by bus was found dead in downtown Victoria. Common sense says VicPD needed to throw every available officer at that investigation, tracking potential witnesses before they disappeared from the city core.)
Esquimalt’s rejection of the CRD’s attempts to force it to accept a sewage plant will be celebrated by those who don’t think Esquimalt’s neighbours should be allowed to make it swallow a plan it finds unpalatable, and condemned by those who don’t think one little municipality should be permitted to hold the others hostage.
Complicating the mess is the divided opinion over whether we need sewage treatment at all, or, even if we do, whether the CRD’s plan would work.
The fact is, though, that the region is legally bound to provide treatment, and risks losing the federal and provincial funding — roughly two-thirds of the total cost — if it doesn’t get its act together soon.
And with a dozen little fiefdoms acting on their own, don’t hold your breath on that happening with sewage, policing, transportation or anything else.
© Copyright Times Colonist