A6
Opinion
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
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The Prince George Free Press, founded in 1994, is published every Wednesday and Friday in Prince George by Prince George Publication Limited Partnership. Contents copyright of Prince George Publication Limited Partnership.
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Getting to the core of the city
The time has come for people in Prince George to state where they see the City of Prince George being able to improve the services it provides. The Core Services Review the city has undertaken is reaching the end of another public-input phase, with this week being an important one for people who want a say in what the city is doing right and wrong in the services it provides. The city has provided a number of ways for people to get involved. One is an online survey, available at www. princegeorge.ca, and then look for Core Review Survey in the Frequently Visited Pages box to the left. The city has organized its services into seven separate areas, and there is a separate survey for each. The seven areas are planning; development; emergency and enforcement; internal support services; public works; parks, recreation and culture; and governance and leadership. Each area has a service profile which describes what services are provided in that area, what the service level is, and performance, rationale and budget for each service in that area. You can make your opinions known The city is in any or all of the program area surgiving the public plenty veys, or you can provide comments in the summary survey. of ways to The surveys will be available online speak up until Aug. 3. on the core As well, tonight, July 25, provides review. Now it’s up to the an opportunity to get questions public to take answered and make your opinions known during a public workshop. The advantage. workshop is set for 6 p.m. at the Civic Centre, and you have to register to attend. You can do so by calling 250-561-7602 or e-mailing csrworkshop@city. pg.bc.ca. If you need more information on council’s strategic priorities as you go through the program areas, that information is available on the same website as the surveys. Council is doing a great job of making sure the public has every opportunity to have a say in how the core services it provides should be administered. There are a couple of things to remember, however. First, there is clearly no way they can incorporate every suggestion made during this ongoing process into the city’s strategic plans. Second, the final decisions on what the core services will look like when the review is completed still rest with council. They have indicated they want to hear from the citizens. It is up to the citizens to take advantage of this opportunity – and then it is up to council to show it listened to the concerns of all the people, not just a select few. Think of this process as being like an election. The old saying is, “If you don’t vote, don’t complain about who gets in.” In this case, if you don’t make your feelings known about what the core services the city provides should look like in the future, don’t complain when things don’t unfold the way you want them to.
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Q OPINION
Diggin’ inside a tractor
backs of gently mooing cows and their frolWith any luck, when you read this I’ll be icking calves, you spend at least two or three perched atop a honkin’ big tractor, doing some lying in some cattle muck with your body honkin’ big tractor stuff. twisted in a way only master yoga Without any luck, when you read instructors can dream of, trying to this I’ll be perched underneath a get a half-inch nut off a rusted bolt honkin’ big tractor, cursing the only to discover, after you’ve stripped fact that I never took mechanics in Writer’s it, that the manufacturer decided to school. Block put one metric bolt on your piece of It is haying time once again and, BILLPHILLIPS equipment. (Believe me, it happens. as of writing this, about the only We had a tractor where the body was piece of equipment that’s working assembled in a country that used standard on the family farm is the weather vane warnsizes and the engine in one where they used ing that the good haying weather is soon to metric … not sure how they got the two to fit come to an end and we still haven’t got either together but they did.) tractor going. And people wonder why farmers are a As mentioned, I was never very good at cranky old lot. mechanics. Nothing’s changed. I’m hoping all that we have to do to the old My dad was a pro. But my mechanics lesFord is bleed the fuel lines. If that doesn’t do it, sons as a kid entailed me standing beside it will likely be a case of the old Ford bleeding some piece of equipment, keeping an eye on the cash lines. my dad’s feet sticking out from underneath it, Then there’s the round-baler that seems to wriggling every so often as he wrestled with have developed hay fever. It works fine as some immovable object, and listening to a long as it’s not near hay. I’m thinking a stick of string of curse words that almost sounded like dynamite might be the cure there. poetry. At least the neighbours will come over and Every so often he would ask for a half-inch laugh at us. But that’s okay, I’ll laugh at them spanner and I would quickly hand him a 5/8” when the air conditioning breaks down in their box-end. $80,000 John Deere that pales in character comMy father always encouraged me to go to parison to the 30-year-old open-air Ford with university. blackened bits from when we set it on fire one That’s the thing about being a farmer … for day and hydraulics that work backwards no every day you spend wistfully walking in the matter which way we put the hoses on. gentle pastoral fields of waist-high Timothy as Who need mechanics? the dappled sun bounces gently off the auburn Circulation Manager ....................... Heather Trenaman Email: circulation@pgfreepress.com.............250-564-0504
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