FIRE ON MIDDAY VALLEY RD
ONE AND ONE AT SHOWCASE
No one inside the structure, which was completely destroyed by suspicious blaze / Page 2
In spite of starting with a win against Surrey, the Cents couldn’t make it happen again / Page 9
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MERRITT HERALD FREE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2015 • MERRITT NEWSPAPERS
PLANNING AHEAD PASSES
BIOSOLIDS
RESOLUTION
AT UBCM Michael Potestio THE MERRITT HERALD
Age-friendly action plan open house seeks local perspective The city hosted an open house last week to gather citizen’s input on what elements are most important to making Merritt “age-friendly.” Michael Potestio/Herald Michael Potestio THE MERRITT HERALD
The city is halfway through developing a practical plan geared toward making Merritt a more pleasant place for seniors. “I’ve challenged the consultants to create some action items that we can actually do and we can apply a dollar figure to, put it in the budget and then do it,” said City of Merritt planning and development manager Sean O’Flaherty. Most of the city’s master plans contain general guidelines, with a wish list and direction, but the age-friendly action plan will contain more details than that, such as cost estimates. To help develop this age-friendly action plan, the city has contracted MMM Group — the company that helped rewrite the town’s zoning bylaws last year. The suggested projects will be classified
A, B and C. Those falling into Class A will be the most detailed. “You could go to a tender with Class A,” O’Flaherty said. Even initiatives that don’t fall within the scope of the city’s jurisdiction such as health care projects can be included in this plan. Joe Mocilac with MMM Group said any health care related projects included in the plan by public demand can be used by council to demonstrate the needs in their community to the province. “We’re canvassing the community as a whole, we’ve done surveys now and [the plan] gives the city a bargaining tool to go back to [Interior Health] and [say] ‘Look, the community said this, how can we facilitate this,” Mocilac said. The plan is broad in scope and is based on World Health Organization principles,” he said. Last Wednesday the city held a three-
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hour open house to allow residents to give their input on the age-friendly action plan via a series of exercises. One exercise asked visitors what elements are most important to making Merritt an age-friendly community. Participants were given three choices from a list that included housing, health care service, transportation, social inclusion, open space buildings, civic participation and employment, social participation. The early favourites were transportation and health services. Other exercises asked participants to identify areas in the community that make Merritt age-friendly and what needs improvement. One concern O’Flaherty said he’s been hearing a lot of is that improvements are needed to the Voght Street intersection with Nicola Avenue.
See ‘Median’ Page 3
Resolution B-59 passed at the Union of BC Municipalities convention in Vancouver last Friday. The Thompson-Nicola Regional District and City of Merritt joint resolution asks the province to form a committee to examine and recommend changes to the biosolids review process as well as the Organic Matter Recycling Regulation and Agricultural Land Commission Act. There were more than 1,500 delegates at the convention and the resolution passed in a block of others with no opposition. Anyone opposed to a motion can pull it out of a block to open it up to debate. TNRD Area M director Randy Murray said he felt the resolution probably didn’t face any opposition because it’s a contentious issue that’s too big to tackle at UBCM. While the passing of this resolution doesn’t change any regulations, it now becomes an issue for UBCM staff to bring to the provincial government. The province is expected to respond to this and other UBCM-approved resolutions in 2016. Murray pointed out that if government chose to respond by doing nothing, it could create an election issue for them the following year in 2017.
See ‘Resolution’ Page 3
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