Concerns in Colwood

Western separatists rattle sabres

Dreams of a common approach to managing growth on Southern Vancouver Island could be in trouble, as the mayors of three communities on the region’s western edges have asked their staff to examine the implications of providing infrastructure and utility services independent of the Capital Regional District.

Colwood mayor David Saunders says his citizens often don’t receive the best bang for their tax bucks by being part of the present regional governance structure and so he has entered discussions with Langford and Sooke to determine if there are areas ripe for cooperation.

“Clearly there are services that our municipalities can be looking at together in partnership to make sure that the money that we send out on behalf of our citizens is actually going to the West Shore rather than going downtown where it’s a weighted vote at the CRD,” Saunders says.

Saunders cites the clean-up of the Millstream Meadows contaminated site in the Highlands, where Colwood citizens are being asked to pay the largest share to remediate a location poisoned by industries in the region’s core. He says the chief administrative officers of the three municipalities have been asked to examine a variety of areas, including infrastructure and roads, energy, sewage and resource recovery and water.

CRD board chair Geoff Young admits that while costs are sometimes allocated unfairly among the CRD’s member municipalities, inequities often cut both ways, as occurred when the core municipalities helped foot the bill for piped water to Sooke. He adds that the prospect of cleaving the South Island’s municipalities in two is bound to make for a messy divorce.

“There’s all the issues of transportation,” says Young. “When people live in one area and work in another area, you’re not, I think, going to have them get off one bus and on to another bus governed by a different transit district, and it doesn’t make any sense to have all the bike paths and other transportation facilities broken in the middle or built in isolation,” says Young. “You would be abandoning any hope of a rational sort of growth strategy by dividing the regional district into two.”

Staff of the three municipalities are expected to report out on the issue within two months.