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CLOWNING AROUND FOR CANADA DAY: Members of the Comox Valley Caring Clowns Club gathered at the Lewis Centre on Monday to lay plans for putting smiles on people’s faces at next Tuesday’s July 1 Canada Day parade through downtown Courtenay. Club members donned their colourful costumes and picked up
Volume 20, No. 51
supplies of Canadian flags to wave and distribute to crowds expected to line Fifth Street prior to the celebrations continuing in both Lewis and Simms Parks. (Philip Round photo)
911 call centre switching from Courtenay to Vancouver Transfer ‘will save taxpayers $1.7m’ By Philip Round Echo Staff Emergency 911 calls from across the North Island will be handled in Vancouver and not Courtenay from the fall. Facing rapidly rising costs from the RCMP for providing the service from its base at the Ryan Road Detachment, the contract will be transferred to E-Comm, the not-forprofit emergency communications centre in Vancouver which already fields calls from large parts of the province. The move will save North Island taxpayers an estimated $1.7 million over the next five years, said North Island 911 board chair Jon Ambler, who is also a Courtenay councillor. The new five-year contact will cost just over $2 million, whereas the RCMP was seeking nearly $3.7 million to cover the same period. “For Comox Valley taxpayers alone, their share of the annual bill will be $112,000 less than what it would have been if we had renewed the RCMP contract,” Ambler noted. But he insisted the service provid-
ed would be every bit as good: “With E-Comm, you will be talking to one of the best 911 call centres in North America,” he told the Echo. He said the 911 board had no operational issues with the Courtenay centre, which had worked well for many years, handling as many as 63,000 calls annually. When calls come in, sophisticated computer mapping and data files
show the operator the location of the emergency so they can instantly alert police, fire and ambulance services as appropriate. But the RCMP had conducted a core review of its work, and had advised the 911 board that if the centre was to stay at the Detachment, the annual charge for the service would have to be hiked by $250,000 a year - an increase of more than 50 per cent.
That information triggered a major review of how the service operated and whether a similar high standard of call answering could be provided at a more economical price. Various options were considered, independent analysis sought, and site visits arranged to other potential providers, leading to last Friday’s board decision to go with E-Comm from a date to be fixed this fall.
At the same meeting, the board agreed to renew the fire dispatch contract for the North Island to the Campbell River Fire Department. They are alerted to emergencies by the primary 911 call receiving centre and then have responsibility for calling out firefighters from any of the 49 fire halls across the North Island and Sunshine Coast. (Continued on page 2)
Bid to change RGS to allow Stotan Falls development blocked 3L says it will challenge decision in court By Philip Round Echo Staff Regional District directors should take a firm stand to defend the Regional Growth Strategy and just say ‘No’ to 3L’s proposals for major development close to Stotan Falls, Jack Minard told the committee of the whole on Tuesday. And the committee backed his view in a 7-3 vote, rejecting the company’s request to start the ball rolling on a process that it hoped would lead
to an amendment of the strategy to allow a development between the Puntledge and Browns River to progress. The block on amending the RGS to accommodate the Riverwood project, at least in advance of a scheduled five-year review in 2016, was endorsed by the full board later in the day. But representing 3L, Kabel Atwall said after the board meeting the company was not prepared to accept ‘no’ for an answer, and they now considered they had no other option but to pursue the matter through the courts. “We will have to seek legal recourse,” he told the Echo. “We do not believe they followed their own
process - and if a judge agrees with us, the process will have to get underway. “It’s clearly obvious that some of them have their minds made up and don’t want to be swayed - whether that leads to a larger law suit we don’t know yet.” At the committee, Minard - who represents the Comox Valley Conservation Strategy - reminded directors of the “long and hard-fought process” with huge public participation that eventually led to the unanimous adoption of the Regional Growth Strategy. (Continued on page 2)