Some unfinished updates for Prince Rupert City Council to take care of ...

Next week we head towards "consultation season" for Prince Rupert City Council, with both Council sessions for March to perhaps find a more engaged than usual audience on hand to share some thoughts on a couple of key issues that Council members want some feedback on.

At the February 25th City Council session, the call was issued for the public to make the trip down to 424 Third Avenue West on March 11th and 25th to offer comments, observations and guidance for the council members on both the 2019 Budget and the salary proposals for council.

The latter delivered at the February meeting by the city's select committee that had been tasked to study the issue of pay for Council.

Heading towards Monday's first opportunity for comment, the city has provided for a fair bit of background material to study up on when it comes to the Budget themes; not so much as things turn out when it comes to what you may need to know to offer a comment on the salary recommendations.

Towards those twin discussion themes, regular readers of the blog will have perhaps had a chance to review our notes on the two topics last week, but if not, you can find some observations from our archive pages below:

Budget Planning Process Archive 2019

Employment and Labour Notes 2019

Since March it seems will be Information Sharing season, the Mayor and Council may also want to take advantage of having the public on hand, to perhaps bring us all up to speed on a few other themes that have been introduced in recent months.

The first and most important of the bunch, an update on the status of the city's drinking water, which still remains under a Water Quality Advisory notice, that shift in status coming after close to six weeks of a Boil Water Order.

Since the downgrade of the Water notice to an advisory, the city has seemingly moved on from the need for any form of further updates on the situation, with fewer and fewer notices through the either city website, or by way of the ever active social media accounts that are hosted by both the municipal government or the Mayor.

An update on whether those pesky critters of Woodworth and Shawatlans lake are still causing mischief with our water and perhaps some background notes from Northern Health on the ongoing testing such as if the results are improving, remaining stable or getting worse, might help to reassure residents that the immediate water concerns remain a priority for Council.

Council may also wish to bring us up to date on the call for a report from staff on how the city responded to the original Boil Water Order situation, something that as of yet has not been discussed during a public council session.

Another topic that might have captured the interest of the public in recent weeks, was the rather sudden push to take to behind closed doors a discussion on how the Fire Department plans to approach fire fighting.

As we noted in early February, a report from the Fire Chief had been scheduled to be discussed at the February 11th meeting, but never quite made it to the public discussion stage of the Council meeting.

That after Council decided to return it to some kind of a workshop setting, taking it out of the public spotlight and leaving residents to wonder what exactly the city has planned.

Considering the importance that Fire Protection has for the city's residents and business owners, any debate on the future of the department is one that should take place in a public setting.

Something that will allow for those who will be impacted the most, to have a better understanding and a say as to where that topic currently stands and how the city may move forward on it.

Where things stand with Port Edward and the Ridley Island Tax Agreement situation might also be worthy of an update, particularly how it seems to loom large in all of the budget notes provided so far by the CFO and Council members.

Judging by the tone of the commentary in recent weeks,  the discussions between the Mayor and Council with their counterparts in the District do not seem to have gone as the City had hoped.

Since we were all called to action on the theme during the campaign for Council of the fall, providing Prince Rupert residents with some background on where things stand at the moment might be helpful towards a better understanding the budget narrative.

Now we don't want to put too many items on the March list,  but there is one other thing that caught our attention during all the budget preparation that the Council may want to expand on and that's Watson Island.

As we observed last week, the Industrial site now christened the Watson Intermodal Trade and Logistics Park has made for a major part of the city's narrative for the Budget for 2019, with the Mayor, City Manager and CFO all making note of the progress that has been found three.

With an interested audience hopefully on hand, this month might be a good time then to share more details on what kind of success the city has had in attracting tenants to the site.

To this point, the only tenant that the city has celebrated has been the Pembina Pipeline corporation, which is working towards development of an LPG terminal for the site.

Since there doesn't appear to be any kind of online presence for the Watson Island Trade and Intermodal Park through a website, or Facebook page to review and the city has yet to celebrate any new arrivals through its social media streams; an update as to who else is moving on over to Watson Island would be a helpful resource for residents to get a better understanding of the city's excitement about the reborn site.

As part of that information review, another helpful bit of background might be a look at the state of the remediation process for the island and some details as to how much the city has spent so far to bring the site back to life, where they have pulled the money from towards that work, as well as to how that compares to the revenue delivered so far.

Our archive of notes on Watson Island has become kind of a dusty thing of late, with little to add in the way of official information, so we're looking forward to having some new entries to add to the page to chart the progress for the city's much celebrated Watson initiatives.

The most important aspect of March though is the need for the public to become engaged and to make sure that the city knows exactly what they think about the budget, the salary plans or any other issues that have been making the rounds of the city's coffee shops and watering holes over the last few months.

You can have your voice added to the discussion Monday night at City Hall staring at 7PM

For more items of note on municipal politics see our Council Discussion page here.

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