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Friday, December 13 • 2013
Vol. 6 • Issue 48
Young and old alike enjoyed Holiday Train See Page 2
Bantam hockey squad struggles at tourney See Page 21
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Timber truck ties up traffic An accident involving a logging truck and a pick up shut down the highway south of Nelson Thursday morning. Nelson Fire Department reported that “luckily there were no injuries” in the incident that caused significant damage to the pick-up truck and saw the logging truck completely blocking both lanes of Highway 6. “Once the scene was determined to be safe the responding crew set up traffic control, rerouting light vehicle traffic through Perrier Lane,” said Cpt. Jeff Herbert in a release. A tow truck company removed the logging truck without causing additional damage. Nelson Fire Rescue reminds motorists to drive to the conditions and pay extra attention to other motorists.
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Funds for future wage increases but none for Trafalgar rebuild
School board meets with Ministry
KIRSTEN HILDEBRAND Nelson Star Reporter
Trustees from Kootenay Lake school district met with the Ministry of Education while in Vancouver last weekend. But they didn’t spend the entire time discussing “the elephant in the room,” said newly elected board chair Rebecca Huscroft. As the board struggled to find funds to pay for CUPE wage hikes and became the only district in the province to hold out on approving a savings plan, they didn’t hear from the Minister of Education. They knew Minister Peter Fassbender wouldn’t
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be present at the meeting and decided not to bring up a discussion best had with the education leader. “We weren’t going to address the savings plan at that point. In all honesty, they couldn’t answer our questions… The response would have been ‘we’ll take your concerns back.’ We weren’t responded to in our letters previously and we didn’t want to be faced with the same frustration,” said Huscroft. Kootenay Lake was one of about a dozen districts who met with the ministry’s Mike Roberts and Joel Palmer, capital management branch. Local trustees and Superintendent Jeff Jones were present. They did bring up the savings plan at the very end of the
meeting but other items took precedence. Beyond CUPE contract negotiations are BC Teachers Federation wage negotiations and already this March, support workers start negotiating on their next contract. Kootenay Lake wanted to know how this would be funded. CUPE wage hikes were funded under the capital gains mandate that is no longer active. “They rest assured we would be funded by the ministry for any wage increases in the future,” Huscroft said. “That is good news but in the same breath you take it with a grain of salt. Things change.” Continued on Page 4
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