Levy rejected Supreme Court quashes city’s bylaw to recoup 911 costs. PAGE 16 Original tunes Former Black Sabbath bassist performing in Nanaimo. PAGE B1 Fast pace Province’s best fastball teams vie for senior men’s title in Cedar. PAGE 3
Silly boats set to sail PAGE 7
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THURSDAY, JULY 12, 2012
VOL. 24, NO. 32
Plan in place for city’s future Council adopts new strategic plan after five months of work
Haze of smoke from U.S. fires blankets region BY CHRIS BUSH THE NEWS BULLETIN
BY TOBY GORMAN THE NEWS BULLETIN
Nanaimo’s future is sitting in a 20-page binder. After five months of interviews with citizens, community leaders, youth and senior citizens, as well as hundreds of hours of council and staff consideration, the document that will guide Nanaimo’s priorities for the next 15 years was unanimously approved Monday. Two councillors, George Anderson and Bill Bestwick, considered the official corporate strategic plan important enough they voted by teleconference from their vacations in Italy and Hawaii, respectively. Anderson set an early alarm clock – 3 a.m. Italian time – to vote in favour. Your Voice, Our Nanaimo is the result of more than 500 workshop and interview participants, 370 survey respondents and more than 3,500 hits on the steering committee’s strategic planning blog. The goal is to get city council, staff and residents moving in the same direction to establish Nanaimo as a premier municipality to work, live and play.
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CHRIS BUSH/THE NEWS BULLETIN
The waterfront is one of six priorities identified in the new strategic plan, approved by council Monday.
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This was a question of finding out what people wanted ... council to focus on.
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The plan’s function is to guide council in its four determined pillars of sustainability: social equity, environmental responsibility, economic health and cultural vitality. By identifying those pillars, council and staff will then determine future budgets to ensure the priorities are met. Ken Balmer, spokesman for Rethink (West) Inc., a consulting company that assisted the strategic planning steering committee, said everything in
the plan is community-driven. “This wasn’t a question of drawing something up and sending it out for comment,” he said. “This was a question of finding out what people wanted, what they wanted council to focus on, and the draft followed all of that debate.” The final product cost taxpayers $121,000 and is the first of its kind in Nanaimo. ◆ See ‘PRIORITIES’ /4
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Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but sometimes the blaze can be a long way off. The heavy haze, blocking the view of coastal mountain ranges from Nanaimo, is coming from huge wildfires burning across the western U.S., said Marg Drysdale, B.C. Coastal Fire Centre spokeswoman. “There’s multiple fires across the western United States right now,” Drysdale said. “A lot of them are very large fires. People assume it’s just the Colorado fire, but they’re getting hammered down there.” Smoke over northern B.C. also followed the jet stream across the Pacific Ocean from about 190 wildfires burning in Siberia. But Doug Lundquist, Environment Canada meteorologist, said those fires would only contribute a light, even haze in the upper atmosphere. Most of the low-altitude, heavy smoke was carried into B.C. by air flowing north out of Arizona. “With the flow pattern in the lower part of the atmosphere and a strong inversion aloft, we couldn’t see how that Asian air could make it down to the surface,” Lundquist said. A growing wildfire southeast of Merritt, B.C., is also contributing thicker smoke accumulations in the central Interior. “Most of the smoke in B.C. probably came from south of the border and now some is homegrown,” Lundquist said. ◆ See ‘GUIDELINES’ /4
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