The Chilliwack
Progress Thursday
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Scene
News
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Mozart
Yarrow
Karate
Rebecca Paulding sings ‘mostly Mozart’
Yarrow Days rock the schoolhouse
Four head to Taiwan
120 YEARS YOUR COMMUNITY
NEWSPAPER
1891-2011
Y O U R C O M M U N I T Y N E W S PA P E R • F O U N D E D I N 1 8 9 1 • W W W. T H E P R O G R E S S . C O M • T H U R S D AY, J U N E 2 , 2 0 1 1
Teachers to take strike vote Union unhappy with pace of negotiations Katie Bartel The Progress If B.C. teachers vote in favour of going on strike, students will not be immediately affected, said the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association president. “What we want out of the strike vote obviously is what every union wants: to increase pressure,” said CTA president Katharin Midzain. The B.C. Teachers Federation (BCTF) announced earlier this week that if no progress is made in collective bargaining in the next two weeks, the union will hold a strike vote between June 24 and June 28. If passed, job action could begin on September 6, the first day of school. The first phase of the strike would include a reduction in administrative and ministry mandated services, such as supervision at recess and before and after school supervision. Teachers would also not attend any administrative meetings, and if job action continued into November, report cards would not be distributed. In-classroom and extracurricular activities, however, will not be affected, said Midzain. “We will still be teaching and teachers will still meet with parents when they feel they need to. The communication with parents will be ongoing according to what the teacher feels is needed, but it won’t be ministry mandated and it won’t be administration mandated.” Collective bargaining between the BCTF, provincial government and local school boards began in March. Continued: UNION/ p4
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Members of the Chilliwack Fire Department pass sandbags to each other while protecting a property from flood waters at the end of Ballam Road on Monday. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Flood ‘preventable’ say Ballam Road residents Robert Freeman
Resident John van den Brink said he told city officials three years ago that the bank was erodMore than a million dollars in ing, but nothing was done. Now the city won’t step in to lost income, crops drowned or close the breach, he said, and not planted, expensive fertilizers the river has found a new route washed away. And it was all preventable, that will put more properties outside the dike at risk down the some Ballam Road shoreline as the river residents are saying, rises with the spring after a river bank colfreshet. video-online] lapsed late Sunday “It’s not going to and the muddy Fraser fix itself, and it’s just www.theprogress.com River came flooding going to get worse,” over their land. he said. “This was not an act Chilliwack Mayor Sharon Gaetz of God,” said one resident, but the result of failure to maintain the said the city reacted immediately river bank. “It’s mismanagement, to the residents’ midnight call for help, and fast action by volunteer basically,” he said. firefighters kept the water from
The Progress
entering any of the three homes at risk. She said the city has been told by flood specialists that armoring a river bank against the force of a direct river current is an “exercise in futility,” and cited the example of the Island 22 campsite that was lost to erosion when the river changed direction. The mayor couldn’t say why the change in direction occurred at Ballam Road, but residents there speculated that gravel removed from the river last year near Jesperson Road was to blame. But Chilliwack MLA John Les, an advocate of gravel removal for flood protection, said a hydrologist studies each removal site before it is approved.
“I really don’t think that (gravel removal) altered the course of the river, or would have,” he said, in a telephone interview Wednesday. Les, the former mayor of Chilliwack, said residents living outside the dike are in a “nebulous” area where government jurisdiction is not “well-defined,” so it’s not clear who is responsible for maintaining river banks. However, he said when he was mayor in the late ‘90s “I recognized the danger of just allowing this (bank erosion at Ballam Road) to proceed unchecked, so I spent some city money, a bit of an investment to help preclude more serious erosion.” Continued: FLOOD/ p13