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Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Opinion
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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■ OPINION
Diggin’ inside a tractor With any luck, when you read this I’ll be backs of gently mooing cows and their frolperched atop a honkin’ big tractor, doing some icking calves, you spend at least two or three honkin’ big tractor stuff. lying in some cattle muck with your body Without any luck, when you read twisted in a way only master yoga this I’ll be perched underneath a instructors can dream of, trying to honkin’ big tractor, cursing the get a half-inch nut off a rusted bolt fact that I never took mechanics in only to discover, after you’ve stripped Writer’s school. it, that the manufacturer decided to Block It is haying time once again and, put one metric bolt on your piece of BILLPHILLIPS as of writing this, about the only equipment. (Believe me, it happens. piece of equipment that’s working We had a tractor where the body was on the family farm is the weather vane warnassembled in a country that used standard ing that the good haying weather is soon to sizes and the engine in one where they used come to an end and we still haven’t got either metric … not sure how they got the two to fit tractor going. together but they did.) As mentioned, I was never very good at And people wonder why farmers are a mechanics. Nothing’s changed. cranky old lot. My dad was a pro. But my mechanics lesI’m hoping all that we have to do to the old sons as a kid entailed me standing beside Ford is bleed the fuel lines. If that doesn’t do it, some piece of equipment, keeping an eye on it will likely be a case of the old Ford bleeding my dad’s feet sticking out from underneath it, the cash lines. wriggling every so often as he wrestled with Then there’s the round-baler that seems to some immovable object, and listening to a have developed hay fever. It works fine as string of curse words that almost sounded like long as it’s not near hay. I’m thinking a stick of poetry. dynamite might be the cure there. Every so often he would ask for a half-inch At least the neighbours will come over and spanner and I would quickly hand him a 5/8” laugh at us. But that’s okay, I’ll laugh at them box-end. when the air conditioning breaks down in their My father always encouraged me to go to $80,000 John Deere that pales in character comuniversity. parison to the 30-year-old open-air Ford with That’s the thing about being a farmer … for blackened bits from when we set it on fire one every day you spend wistfully walking in the day and hydraulics that work backwards no gentle pastoral fields of waist-high Timothy as matter which way we put the hoses on. the dappled sun bounces gently off the auburn Who need mechanics? Circulation Manager ....................... Heather Trenaman Email: circulation@pgfreepress.com.............250-564-0504
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