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June 26, 2013
Inside
District of Lake Country’s top bureaucrat honoured with award. ...............................
3 MANJIT BASRA
from Rutland Farm Market, is ready to serve customers in his booth at the Lake Country Farmer’s Market, which will be back open this Friday at Swalwell Park in Lake Country from 3 to 7 p.m.
MP Ron Cannan says the federal government is monitoring the prices we pay at the pumps for gasoline. ...............................
CONTRIBUTED
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District council supports using the Aspen Grove Golf Course for sports fields at new school. ...............................
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Flyers ■ Home Depot ■ JYSK ■ Rona ■ Shoppers Drug Mart
▼ DISTRICT NOTES
District staffing cutbacks put kibosh on new projects KEVIN PARNELL The District of Lake Country’s planning department is stretched to the point of not being able to take on more projects after staffing levels were cut in half following a business systems review in early 2012. The issue of staffing levels at the district was raised at last week’s
council meeting after Coun. Owen Dickie put forward a motion for staff to look into getting some signs in place in areas where agriculture is taking place. But the district’s chief administrative officer told council there is not enough staff to take on new projects without another one being removed from a priority list al-
ready approved by council. “We don’t have the capacity to do this inhouse,” said De Feo. “We went through a review, we cut our staff in half, we cut the times to process applications in half, which is way better than any other place in the Okanagan,” he said. “We are really pushing the limits here.”
Lake Country’s director of planning and development also told council that the cutbacks to staffing levels in the planning department has made it more difficult to operate, especially since staff has been asked to deal with files in the same time or quicker than in the past. “The difficult part is the expectation has re-
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Koch pointed to the amount of building containers in and around the community and how they are stored as one area that has no policy in Lake Country but needs some attention. With current staffing levels, those kinds of issues cannot be dealt with,” he said.
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mained the same in terms of file times,” said Mark Koch, Lake Country’s director of planning and development. “There are areas that we would like to spend some time around some policy improvements. There are a number of examples around the community that need some attention but we are not able to get to.”
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