Leslie’s council email update, September 21, 2008

Hello everyone:

Welcome to autumn.  It would be hard to imagine a stronger signal that fall is here than the weather transition we had overnight!

THE FINE PRINT

These emails represent just my point of view; they do not represent the point of view of Town Council or of the Town of Banff.  I hope you will comment on or question anything I say that is unclear or that you disagree with.  I hope you'll also check in with other members of council for their points of view.

You can get off this list at any time by just sending an email to lataylor@telusplanet.net and telling me that you'd like to unsubscribe.

Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you wish to.  If they'd like to sign up for the list, they can just send me an email and I'll add them on.

DOOR-KNOCKING

As you know, I've started door-knocking through town.  When I mused in my last email that people might have more to say to me now that I'm a councillor, I didn't know how right I was!  It's taking about three times as long to do the doors as it took last year during the campaign -- people are ready to talk, and I'm having some great conversations.  I've finished Valleyview and expect to finish Middle Springs 1/2g today.  At this rate, I should be done around Christmas!

I start off by explaining why I'm door-knocking (no, I'm not canvassing for a federal candidate!) and then I ask two questions, which I have tried to keep as neutral as possible:

  • please tell me one thing that the Town is doing that you like, and
  • please tell me one thing you think we could improve.

To get a sense of the responses, please go to www.lataylor.com/blog and scroll down through the entries -- I'm writing a brief entry after each door-knocking session, talking about what some of the frequent responses were, and also listing the comments that came from only one household.

COMING TO COUNCIL TOMORROW

Here are some highlights from the Council package for tomorrow.  To see the whole thing -- all 232 pages of it -- please click on http://www.banff.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=1677 and give it a good long time to load.

Requests for financial support

The Whyte Museum is asking for $6800 cash, plus $650 in in-kind support, to assist with the events that they would like to hold in conjunction with the centennial of the Warden Service in 2009.  While I believe that this is an important anniversary, and that Banff is the right place to celebrate it, I need to have a clearer understanding of the other sources of funding before I'm comfortable with this request.

The YWCA is asking for the town to make a grant application on their behalf for $238,000 to assist in the completion of the residence expansion.  They're not asking the town for the money - just to represent them in the application process.

Wayfinding

I'm sure you're as anxious as I am to see the town's wayfinding signage replaced and augmented.  Among other things, I think that improved signage will make it easier for people to find their destinations and find parking spots, and thus help with traffic congestion and perhaps diminish the demand for more parking.  It will also be great to have more signage that is designed for the walkers, thus encouraging people to explore the town on foot.

You can see the report on the project at http://www.banff.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=1677  -- be patient, it's a big package and will take minutes to load.  Scroll down to page 43 for the report. 

I am generally in support of this project and like the look overall, but I still have some concerns about aspects of the designs, including the size/scale of the downtown pedestrian signage, and the too-tempting cast-metal animals on top of some signs (I don't think that those involved in the design understand the number of talented climbers that we have in our community!)  I'll be commenting on those tomorrow in Council.  There is also some suggestion that the project "might" take $206,000 more dollars in 2009 than we have budgeted for it.  I won't be supporting that -- those involved in this design have known the budget all along, and I was assured as recently as the last meeting that the design was being done with the budget firmly in mind.

Secondary Suite Policy

By clicking on http://www.banff.ca/AssetFactory.aspx?did=1677 and scrolling to page 58, you can see the report on the secondary suite policy.

The general idea is to try to address some of the need for affordable housing by expanding the areas of town and the types of houses in which secondary suites can be considered.  Each application would come to the Municipal Planning Commission for approval, and would be considered based on how it would affect the neighbourhood.  Neighbours would be notified and would have a chance to comment. 

What's coming to council tomorrow is just the policy - it's my understanding that land use bylaw amendments would have to be written and go through the normal public process before these ideas could be put into practice.

Please take a look at the proposal and let me know what you think!

Regional Transit

A regional transit authority will be one step closer tomorrow if Council agrees to join with several other organizations (including the Town of Canmore) in a memorandum of understanding to create a regional transportation commission.  You can see the reports, starting on page 65 of the package.  I know that all these administrative steps sound very bureaucratic, but there really is an important light at the end of the paperwork tunnel.  It would be wonderful to have a coordinated public transportation system between communities and to the major destinations in the park!

Recycling costs passed on to newspapers?

In a report that you can see on page 191 of the council package (aren't you glad that we get our packages electronically, instead of printing them out?), Council is being asked whether the town should pursue Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) with the two newspapers.  Briefly, the case is being made that newspapers and their inserts make up about 138,000 kgs of Banff's recycling and an unknown percentage of our waste to landfill, and that we only recover 15 cents for every dollar spent handling this waste.  The question is whether we should charge the newspapers a fee because of the waste they create.

At first glance, this appears like a simple question.  Polluter pays, right?  But newspapers are so important to community information and thus to community democracy.  You might argue that if they didn't exist, we'd have to print them ourselves.  Add to the mix the difficulty that the Crag appears to be in, and I find myself thinking that newspapers are not the place to start with EPR in our community.  But I'd sure love it if they would volunteer to help with this problem in some way ...

All the best 'til next time -- Leslie