At least Nanaimo residents didn’t upstage their royal visitor in 1919
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Chemainus Secondary dancers offer a bit of everything in showcase
A&E, Page 15
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Battle lines drawn over new location for detachment SARAH SIMPSON CITIZEN
Daycare manager Kate Skye, board chair Rachel Jackson and board member Sharon Jackson sort through bottles and cans at the Arcadian Early Learning & Child Care facility Friday afternoon. [SARAH SIMPSON/CITIZEN]
Daycare’s donation stash stolen SARAH SIMPSON CITIZEN
Upwards of 90 per cent of the bottles and cans that staff and parents with Duncan’s Arcadian Early Learning & Child Care had been collecting over the holidays have been stolen.
Staffers with the non-profit childcare centre were alerted late Thursday night that their storage shed had been compromised and much of its contents were gone. “The locks were snapped off the shed and they left the bottles but all the cans that were in bags are
gone,” said Duncan councillor Sharon Jackson, who sits on the group’s board of directors. “It’s just a devastating blow because that was the big fundraiser.” She explained the group receives See Funds from • page 4
Despite sighs of relief from protesters about a second option, last Friday, North Cowichan councillors John Koury, Al Siebring and Jen Woike sent out a press release taking issue with the recent municipal notice announcing an alternate plot upon which a North Cowichan/ Duncan RCMP detachment could eventually sit. While a parcel carved out of the Somenos Marshland has been the prime contender, the municipality announced Wednesday it entered into a conditional purchase agreement on Option B: a 1.21-hectare plot at the northwest corner of Ford and Drinkwater Roads, immediately north of Cowichan Commons. The trio of councillors said that announcement was misleading. Without acknowledging that there has been considerable community opposition to the Beverly Street location, the three councillors disagreed strongly with the mayor’s assertion that there has been difficulty finding a suitable location. “Council only approved the conditional purchase agreement to give us a ‘fall-back position’ in the event the Agricultural Land Commission rejected our
application for the exclusion of the 1.78 hectare parcel on Beverly Street,” said Koury. “It was never about ‘difficulty in finding a suitable location’. And the ALC exclusion application has now been approved.” Woike, too, saw the secondary location as simply a backup plan. “The community has been waiting for almost a year for the ALC ruling, and we didn’t want to be caught without any options should that application have been rejected,” she said. The councillors maintain the Beverly location is still the best spot for the facility. “Our staff and the RCMP have all indicated that, subject to some engineering studies, the Beverly Street site is absolutely a ‘suitable location’, and to indicate otherwise simply doesn’t hold water,” Siebring said. Meanwhile, members of the Somenos Marsh Wildlife Society think it’s infinitely more logical to build near the Commons mall. “The SMWS believes that it is imperative that the recently removed ALR land remain part of the Somenos Marsh Conservation Area and Important See Marsh Society • page 4
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