Municipal

Blatalnt political partisanship, Not opinion.

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Masquerading under the pretence of being an opinion the Abbotsford News “opinion” of Saturday March 22, 2008 has worrying implications for the democratic process in Abbotsford, particularly as regards the upcoming November municipal elections.

This blatant piece of political partisanship in support of John Smith is unbalanced and unfair, containing as it does misleading factual omissions and implied untruths.

“City projects apparently make good targets for detractors of city council, simply because they all cost money.” Only by being completely ignorant of the public record, whether written by my own hand or made in public debate and comment, could anyone truthfully make this statement.

As one of those prejudicially labelled detractors, I am on record as wanting to build a 50 metre indoor competition swimming pool, more all weather soccer fields, upgrades to both the sewage and drinking water treatment plants as well as other needed projects. I was just as critical of council’s failure to build needed projects in order to hold tax increases to zero.

Despite the implication in the News opinion, being opposed to vanity projects such as John Smith’s friendship garden or new, tenantless arena does not mean one is against projects “… simply because they cost money.”

It simply means one is in favour of fiscally responsible behaviours. Behaviours such as setting priorities based upon the needs of the citizens not councils wants.

An example would be the matter of the lack of a single accessible playground for children with disabilities and handicaps. When approached for $50,000 to make ONE playground accessible, John Smith and council could not find $50,000.

But for city councillor John Smith’s garden – $500,000, ten times the amount they COULD NOT find for children. This is praiseworthy – how?

Let us examine one of the glaring omissions made by the News in its opinion. The grant is not without cost to the city since it is a matching funds grant and in order to be able to spend the provincial funds there must be matching city funds. The city is required to come up with $500,000 to get and spend the provincial $500,000.

“Coun. Smith asserts that the city will be able to find local businesses offering in-kind donations to come up with its share…” Ignoring for the moment the reasonableness of accepting unsupported claims that local business will leap in with the needed $500,000; would this not be the same Councillor Smith that assured taxpayers that the provincial government would be contributing millions of dollars to Plan A costs? We are all aware of how those promised funds failed to materialize, leaving taxpayers on the hook for all those nonexistent $$$ millions.

“… it is surely better for Abbotsford that some of this funding come here …” implies that we spend these funds on this friendship garden or not get any funds. A simple check of the facts would reveal this is not the case.

I would suggest that rather than waste Abbotsford’s share of the provincial program these funds come from on Councillor Smith’s friendship garden, the funds be spent on needed projects such as accessibility – which would be far more in keeping with the spirit of the “Spirit” grant(s).

I wish I could go so far as to suggest spending the entire amount on making more than just one single playground accessible to those with disabilities and handicaps but I am not, unlike others, so fiscally irresponsible.

Without cash on the barrelhead, that is donations in hand, the city is on the hook for $500,000 plus any additional spending (currently projected at $400,00) and cost overruns. Unlike the News I am not willing to ignore fiscal reality or past fiscal performance. Where will we get the funds and what work or projects will not be done in order that Councillor Smith can have his friendship garden?

It is irresponsible for the News to promote the friendship garden without an examination of where the $900,000 in city funds will come from and the effect this will have on city operations and budgeting. Unless the News, in its avid support for Councillor Smith’s garden, will be contributing the $900,000?

As to “…it will be the kind of place people will enjoy and be proud of”. We need to consider all the playing fields, green spaces and park spaces that are overgrown with vegetation run wild and so unusable, simply because Parks and Recreation does not have the budget to clean up and maintain these spaces in usable shape. Leaving one to wonder how much additional green space we will lose in paying for Councillor Smith’s garden? Let us also not overlook Jubilee and other parks that would benefit greatly from care and attention.

Obviously the News and I have very different views on what is “real community leadership”. To the News this is apparently merely having “…councillors who strive to accomplish something”.

There are those in the city who probably share the News’s opinion. Among these would be the people who said to me “I don’t think the Plan A projects are what the city needs but I am voting yes because we have to build something.” HUH?

I am sorry but to me leadership is about seeking to accomplish what the city needs to have accomplished. It is about a pool for competitions and to meet the growing demand from swim clubs, school swimming teams and provide more flexibility scheduling public use of our existing pools; attracting businesses, their jobs and their contributions to the tax base and the community; putting in place the waste and drinking water treatment to service our rapidly growing city; about building playgrounds accessible by ALL children.

Leadership is not about vanity projects such as an arena without a tenant, an arena that there was no demand for, nor is it about finding funds for a friendship garden while having no funds to make even a single playground accessible to handicapped or disabled children.

The News is entitled to its opinion, although as a local newspaper this should be in accordance with journalistic principles. In choosing to be partisan in support of John Smith; in choosing to be unbalanced and unfair; in choosing to mislead through factual omissions and implied untruths; the News has chosen to abandon journalistic principles.

This development, in the months leading up to a municipal election, has worrying implications for the democratic process.

Citizens should be outraged by this development, writing to demand this unacceptable state of affairs be corrected.

The Abbotsford News opinion Saturday March 22, 2008

Abbotsford’s proposed International Friendship Garden is already drawing fire. City projects apparently make good targets for detractors of city council, simply because they all cost money.

Our kudos to Coun. John Smith for spearheading this project to create a beautiful space in the city.

It would be easier for him to be a council member who proposes nothing, and who does nothing except vote against proposals that might raise the tax rate. That approach will certainly win a politician the city’s curmudgeon vote, but it is not real community leadership. Better to have councillors who strive to accomplish something.

Parks are an important part of any city, and every community has their residential developers donate land that is set aside for green space. Taking a city’s green spaces and further developing them into ball parks, trails, playgrounds and other facilities is a goal of any city’s parks and recreation department.

The staff at Abbotsford city hall has been aware of the provincial government’s Spirit Squares program, which aims to improve outdoor public meeting and celebration spaces. City hall has taken heat in recent years for not attracting enough provincial and federal funding to the community, but it was able to win Abbotsford the maximum grant under this program, $500,000, and Premier Gordon Campbell came to Abbotsford last Friday to announce the grant.

So, kudos also to city hall officials, elected and hired, for attracting this money to Abbotsford. Detractors do not even acknowledge the good in this, saying it is all taxpayers’ money. But it is surely better for Abbotsford that some of this funding come here, and not to some other city’s “spirit square.”

Coun. Smith asserts that the city will be able to find local businesses offering in-kind donations to come up with its share of what will be a million-dollar garden. So it should not be costly, but it will be the kind of place people will enjoy and be proud of.

Consider

Re: Drug Kids editorial from The Post

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Mr. Bateman, assuming your implicit argument that these children are in more toxic environment than they would be in under the care of the Ministry of Children and Families is correct, I find it extremely unlikely that there is not a single provision of our current child protection legislation under which a child can be remove from dangerous drug lab or grow-op environments is correct. In fact I find it hard to believe that those charged with protecting these young citizens cannot find numerous provisions to use to remove and place these children in other environments.

If police officers, social workers and our justice system require a clear signal that children in grow-ops or drug labs are in need of help – our society is in serious trouble. I would go so far as to say that anyone who needs a “province wide directive” in order to act on behalf of children in these circumstances is in the wrong job and should seek employment elsewhere.

Mr. Bateman’s original editorial The Post Friday March 21, 2008

My wife and I have two little girls under the age of five. They are bright and happy and we would stop at nothing to keep them safe. Every night, I tuck those two girls into their beds and I say a little prayer that God would keep them healthy.

Not every child in B.C. is so lucky .In hundreds of other homes across this province, children sleep in beds with hastily-wired electrical cables running past them. Toxic mould grows in the walls. Poisonous drug precursors litter the house .Dirty needles lay in the living room, and crystal meth residue is all over the kitchen.

This is a new social issue in B.C. and it should break the heart of anyone who cares about children. These are drug-endangered children and there are hundreds of them living on borrowed time.

As a Langley Township councillor, the issue of drug-endangered children first came onto my radar when I received a memo from our fire chief. Like Abbotsford and many other municipalities, Langley has put together a Public Safety Inspection Team, which inspects suspicious electricity users for safety violations. We do it because these homes are far more likely to burn than others, and we need to protect our neighbourhoods .In the memo, our fire chief reported that the team found evidence of children living in 36 of the 158 grow-ops they discovered.

As I tucked my two little girls into bed that night, I thought about those 36 grow-ops that children lived in. I thought of these kids, living in an environment with shoddy electrical work that could cause a fire at any time. I thought about the toxic mould growing inside the walls– often undetected behind the drywall. That’s why municipalities have strengthened their building bylaws to make sure that homes that had been used as grow-ops or meth labs are brought back up to a healthy standard. I thought about the dangers of living in a home that could be the target of an organized crime grow-rip.

I started reading, researching, and asking questions. I found the story of little Deon, Jackson and Megan White, three preschoolers killed in a meth lab explosion in California. I saw pictures of babies – the same age as my little Danica – with burns from meth precursors on their faces.

I saw pictures of meth ingredients contaminating the same kitchens that kids eat in. I read about power cables running under cradles to grow-ops. I read about needles and drugs being found next to sleeping infants. These children are being abused by the carelessness and high-risk lifestyles of their parents and guardians. They deserve better protection.
I’m not the only one who thinks that. Police officers I speak with feel the same way; so does the BC Association of Social Workers; and UCFV criminologist Darryl Plecas; and the Government of Alberta, which has a law protecting drug-endangered children. While the B.C. government has moved to protect children from their parents’ second-hand cigarette smoke in cars, it has ignored the hundreds of children living in grow-ops and meth labs.

In 2006, Alberta passed a Drug-Endangered Children Act, which sent a clear signal to police officers, social workers, and the justice system: children growing up in grow-ops or drug labs are being abused. Their parents are subject to prison terms and fines. The children are seized and put with other family members or in another safe environment.

In B.C., our social workers don’t even have a uniform provincial protocol on how to deal with children found in these homes. Each region makes its own policies, despite three years of lobbying by the BC Association of Social Workers for a province-wide directive. We need to do more for these drug-endangered children. The health studies are staggering.

“Children living in those labs might as well be taking the drug directly, ”says John Martyny, a medicine professor with the National Jewish Medicaland Research Centre in Denver. A U.S. Attorney’s Office study shows that as many as 80 per cent of children rescued from meth labs in the US test positive for toxic levels of the chemicals used in meth production. These chemicals can cause cancer, severe skin conditions, tremors, lead poisoning, kidney, lung and liver diseases and more.

On the grow-op side, the mould from the growing process can cause chronic respiratory problems, neurological damage, and cancer.

That doesn’t count the psychological harm from living in such an environment, or the elevated risk of fires and explosions. Every child deserves a safe and happy place to grow up. When will British Columbia step up to the plate for our hundreds of drug-endangered children.

Municipal

Illegal

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Illegal: adjective forbidden by law or statute; contrary to or forbidden by official rules, regulations, etc.

Immoral: adjective violating moral principles; not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.

Once again I find myself providing definitions for the education of Abbotsford’s city council and staff. Perhaps readers with a spare dictionary could take it to city hall and give it to the mayor? Citizens would then know with certainty that yes city hall has a dictionary; they just choose not to use it.

An aging parent who is ill and needs care, your home is on an acreage with plenty of room for a trailer to provide a home that will allow you to provide care, the rational decision is to put a trailer in for your parent. This is a situation that more and more people across the lower mainland face as our population ages.

Being an honest citizen you go to city hall to inform them of this and get your $287 building permit. Imagine your surprise when you are billed an additional $25,000 for DCCs. Imagine the greater surprise when upon enquiry you are informed that under the city’s new DCC bylaws anyone who gets a building permit for anything is billed $25,000 for DCCs.

Development Cost Charges are the charges municipalities are allowed to levy to cover the cost of providing services (sewer, water etc.) to new developments or construction. It would seem to me that the purpose and scope of these charges is perfectly clear just from their name.

For purposes of clarification the provincial government provides a “Development Cost Charges Best Practices Guide”. Finally there is The Local Government Acts, the statute that govern the powers and behaviours of Abbotsford’s municipal government.

DCCs are to allow the City to cover or recover the costs associated with construction or development; they are clearly not and never were intended as a cash grab method. A fact testified to by the law itself.

Section 933(3) of the Local Government Act states that DCCs are not payable if it can be proven that the development does not impose a new capital cost burden on the municipality, or if a DCC was previously paid for the same development.

Section 933(4) of the Local Government Act says that DCCs are exempt where a building permit is issued for the construction, alteration, or extension of a building that contains less than four dwelling units, and the building is exclusively for residential use, where the costs are less than $50,000.
Section 933(4) also states that the reason for DCC exemptions is to avoid capturing renovations that do not require improvements to infrastructure.

For those who have any doubts remaining the Act also states: “…normal costs of repairing and maintaining existing infrastructure can’t be included, in DCCs, nor can operating costs. DCCs represent a way to hold new development accountable for the infrastructure costs it imposes on existing taxpayers.”

This all seems pretty clear and straight forward to me, how does it seem to you?

Apparently it is not clear to Abbotsford City Council or to staff at Abbotsford City Hall – including it seems, legal staff.

Fortunately for Christine Masztalar, her neighbour Russ Walsh is of Irish decent and happy to fight city hall on her behalf. (As a personal aside I would like to state my opinion that this city would benefit from more neighbours such as Mr. Walsh).

The question is: What about all the other citizens of Abbotsford who did not have a neighbour such as Mr. Walsh or were unaware of what “The Local Government Acts” set out as the law for DCCs?

The attitude and behaviours of Abbotsford City Council and City Staff and their actions and lack of actions on the matter of DCCs has and is totally unacceptable.

That City Hall is not taking immediate action to address this matter thus forcing citizens to go to court and get an estoppal order to put a stop to illegal DCC levying, is unconscionable.

Council and staff have been repeatedly informed of their illegal actions, but for reasons only they know, they continue this illegal activity.

As taxpayers we need be concerned as we will pay any financial costs associated with these illegal actions.

As citizens we should be concerned that these behaviours certainly do not “conform to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics”.