WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2013
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VOL. 17, NO. 43 | $1 + GST
It’s Small Business week across Canada: Success ahead, our local feature PAGES 14-20
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www.lakecowichangazette.com
Local mom wins provincial honour: Baseball BC coach of the year PAGE 11
Fire chiefs for a day: Four area kids win special day at fire hall PAGE 8
The community pays it forward Malcolm Chalmers Jan Matthews in Overdrive gets people up and on the dance floor at the Newman Family Fundraiser on Saturday evening, Oct. 19. Sonya Matthews takes a spin on the dance floor with Bruce Smith. Inset: A card available for signing with well wishes for Charlie Newman’s recovery to the more than 350 people who attended the fundraiser.
Mike D’Amour
LAKE COWICHAN GAZETTE
If you want to be a firefighter with the Caycuse volunteer hall, you’ll need a few things. Items like a fire truck to get to the scene and a hose to douse visible flames. You’ll also need a cap, one to hold upside down as you go door-to-door asking for money to help fund a department that’s just scraping by. To state the hall is strapped for cash is as obvious as saying fire is hot — this is a department that can’t afford to insure all its emergency vehicles and must be careful where it spends its gas money.
Smoke signals
Caycuse: Survival is a day-to-day challenge for Cowichan Valley’s smallest fire department “No department would run the stuff we have because it’s all junk, but it does work,” said acting fire chief Ron Couch. “We have five trucks, one four-by-four rescue vehicle, three pumpers and one main tanker truck; four are licensed and insured, the other one we can’t afford to do it,” he said. “If we blow a tire, we go around
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cap in hand looking for donations to fix the tire.” It’s a situation that has not gone unnoticed, said the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s area director. “No amount of effort has been spared to try and either facilitate some funding for them, or to get them a stable source of funding,” said Ian Morrison, who represents
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Cowichan Lake South/Skutz Falls. “They’ve taken a look at whether they could extend the Honeymoon Bay area and call them Honeymoon Bay No. 2, all sorts of time, effort and energy has been put into finding what would be the right fit to provide some stability for those people in Caycuse.” The problem with funding for
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the hall starts and ends with the situation in Caycuse where some land is owned, and other parcels are leased, Morrison explained. “The major landowner is a forest company (TimberWest) and in order to tax, from a regional government perspective, you must have 50 per cent of the landowners holding 51 per cent of the value of the land for the area you wish to cover,” he said. “In order to create a specified service area, the residents and landowners have to petition to create a specified funding area — that’s the whole basis of how taxation works.”
> CAYCUSE page 3
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