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Sentinel
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Northern
Years est. 1954
www.northernsentinel.com
Volume 60 No. 40
Vista Village vexes residents Cameron Orr Residents of the Vista Village trailer park on Columbia Avenue are notably fed up with the owner and landlord of the property who they say has been blocking sales and denying tenant rights. The situation has become so dire that residents have formed a tenants association and have worked continuously with the Kitimat Housing Resource Workers for support. A press release issued last week through the Kitimat Housing Resource Project say the landlord, Lee Ann Wolfin, has been using illegitimate reasons to deny the sale of homes on the property by the residents. Three properties at Vista Village are currently listed for sale through MLS, but some attempts by some home owners to sell have been fruitless. A letter from Vista Village resident Brenda Gordon, which she has allowed to be reported on, notes that there have been two offers on her home, both rejected by the owner for various reasons. “It seems as though she is not happy to have us live in the trailer park, and at the same time she prevents every attempt to sell,” she writes. Gordon said she’s lost out on three separate attempts at sale on her trailer. As of press time our calls to Wolfin had not been returned. At the core of the issue is what is and is not allowed by a landlord of a trailer park in relation to sales. The Kitimat Housing Resource Project in their release claim that the landlord has altered rules for sale at a rapid pace — twice in the past six months — and some of the means to deny sales “is intended to financially exasperate the home owner.” Among those rules at the Vista Village include a need to consult the landlord before listing a home for sale, and for a tenant to provide a full inspection report of the manufactured home. Kitimat Housing Resource Worker Paul LaGace says that through their own investigations those rules are against the Manufactured Home Park Tenancy Act and a landlord would not have jurisdiction on that matter. “There’s literally 100 that are vacant,” said LaGace, who joined a number of Vista Village Trailer Park residents while speaking with media. He said if you look next door, the neighbouring trailer court is entirely full, “It seems, by numbers, that those [Vista Village] could be completely full if they wanted to be,” he added. Continued on page 9
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
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1.30 INCLUDES TAX
A Kitimat RCMP-supplied photo of the truck which was involved in the community wide power outage last Thursday. The truck sheered a power pole at 3 a.m. which cut power and resulted in school closures for the day. The driver had fled before police arrived. Police said they were speaking with the registered owner of the vehicle but by press time they had not said whether they had a suspected driver or not. The incident happened just a few hundred metres north of the rail crossing on Haisla Boulevard, towards Rio Tinto Alcan.
Homelessness hidden but real Cameron Orr Homelessness may not be a visible problem in Kitimat but it’s real. If anyone on Kitimat Council had doubts about that, they had the issue hit home when the Kitimat Housing Resource Project workers introduced McLeod Johnson and wife Brenda Mae, a couple living in Kitimat with no home. The pair were working with local housing workers to find temporary lodging. From networking with volunteers at Monday evenings Community Supper Club dinner, the pair were given a tent and eventually given a spot at Radley Park. “You don’t see homelessness in the daytime, but homelessness is still there at night time. You don’t see the people who are wrapped, curled up in the cold, freezing in the night time,” said McLeod in the impromptu appearance at the September 15 council meeting. “You don’t see them hungry, you don’t see them looking for water in the
morning,” he continued. The subject was on the table as Margaret Warcup and Trish Parsons, who work with a sub-committee of the Kitimat Interagency Committee, were speaking to the need for a new plan for shelter in Kitimat. Last year they, with the District of Kitimat operated an emergency extreme weather shelter, which opened on certain days once cold weather criteria was met. At the conclusion of the weather shelter earlier this year, there were a total of six nights where clients came to use the facility, eight total stays by clients, and four clients overall who used the service. That said, Parsons believes the inconsistent nature of the shelter prevented others from using the service. Warcup also said that through consultation with other community agencies they can fairly assume there’s a number of homeless people in Kitimat.
“We can probably identify 15 individuals in Kitimat that are truly homeless,” she said. Nearby shelters, she said, are entirely full, referring to facilities in Terrace and in Smithers. The local need is what they brought to the council meeting, seeking support from councillors. “We are asking the District of Kitimat to help us with this winter. We need a solution in terms of dealing with those that are potentially homeless in Kitimat,” said Warcup. That assistance will come from determining if the community needs a full-time shelter through the winter or if they need to develop some kind of other supportive housing. BC Housing, she said, suggested the extreme weather shelter again but the challenges relating to when it can and can’t open is prohibitive to people who may need to use it. Continued on page 2
PM477761
Tanker ban bill is introduced ... page 3