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VOL. 27 NO. 25
www.terracestandard.com
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
City ups Co-op lands spending By JOSH MASSEY THE CITY is to spend another $69,000 on the continued environmental rehabilitation of the former Terrace Co-op lands on Greig Ave., adding to a price tag now approaching $1.5 million once the purchase price of the land is taken into account. The large vacant lot used to contain a shopping centre and gas bar, both of which were closed in the late 1990s following a decline in the area’s forest industry. The city then purchased the land for $1 million in
2005 from a second owner and had the old buildings demolished. Then in 2013 the city signed a sale agreement with a Calgary-based real estate company called Superior Lodging for $877,500 so it could build a 100-room hotel. However, as part of the agreement, Superior stipulated that an environmental certificate had to be granted by the provincial government prior to a final sale being made. This certificate of compliance has been hard to attain because Federated Co-
op is still cleaning up the site of the old gas bar using a slow-working system to neutralize any spilled oil or gas in the ground, saying it could take more than five years. Now the provincial environment ministry has said it will allow the city to subdivide the property and exclude the area of the gas bar from the land to be sold. However the city still needs to prove that the area of contamination is not leaking into the adjacent land. “We need to delineate the hydrocarbon plume to prove
it is not on the proposed Superior site,” stated city corporate lands manager Herb Dusdal in a memo to council. A grant from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund would pay for half of the $138,000 cost of the drilling and testing work to support the subdivision application. Assuming that the plume of spilled oil and gas doesn’t extend next door then the city would most likely be granted the environmental certificate it so desperately needs to close the land sale.
Council was not thrilled at having to spend more on the site. “I am going to try to contain myself a little bit about the prospects of spending another $70,000 on a piece of property on which we have spent an incredible amount of money to date,” said councillor Bruce Bidgood when the matter was debated at the Sept. 29 council meeting. The net cost, including the purchase price of $1,050,000 and all work done on the site to date is $1,415,528.
The building demo and remediation costs were $363,193 with operation costs for maintenance to date of $47,865 and environmental site investigation expenses to date of $150,270. The city received $195,800 from the province in 2012 and 2013 to defray the costs of environmental investigation and associated work. Another section of the Co-op lands was sold by the city to Skeena Brewing Company for $96,000.
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Marchers want inquiry for murdered, missing FAMILY AND friends of missing First Nations woman Lana Derrick organized a rally outside the Terrace RCMP detachment Saturday afternoon Oct. 4, calling for a national inquiry into all murdered and missing women. “It’s significant because it’s the Highway of Tears where so many aboriginal women have gone missing,” said rally organizer Wanda Good of the choice to start the march at Ferry Island and then follow Hwy16 downtown. “My cousin [Lana Derrick] went missing 19 years ago on Oct. 7, 1995 so we’ve been looking for her ever since, and we haven’t gotten any answers. We didn’t really get a response initially so there was some frustration, and of course there is more frustration with not knowing what happened to her.” Similar rallies have either happened or are to happen around the north, including Burns Lake and Prince Rupert. They’re meant to have
Honoured Local community advocate recognized \COMMUNITY B1
the federal government hold a public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women not only as a matter to be dealt with through increased law enforcement but as a deeper social issue that requires an inquiry and substantial response from various institutions. Speaking to a group of about 50 on the lawn in front of the RCMP detachment on Eby St., Good outlined what a national inquiry would look like. “What a public inquiry would do would be review from all levels of government from the top right down [to identify] where we are lacking, where evidence is dropped, where women aren’t taken seriously by the RCMP when they make reports, and how quickly the RCMP reacted,” said Good. The disappearance of her cousin Lana, who was 19 and a student Northwest Community College when she went missing in Terrace in 1995, is one of many instances of such cases never being solved. An RCMP report released in May noted
1,200 cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada since 1980. “This government has a tendency to blame the victim, that maybe she shouldn’t have gotten in the wrong vehicle maybe she shouldn’t have been hanging out with the wrong people,” said Good. Speaking along with Good and the First Nations elders was RCMP Sgt. Wayne Clary who is the head of the RCMP’s missing women’s task force called Project E-PANA. “I am here to represent Lana and help discover what happened to her,” said Good. “A lot of work has been put on this investigation and unfortunately a lot of it is behind us but there are a number of tough things we have to do in front of us. We are going to keep going forward. We have a unit that follows every single one and makes sure they are done properly,” he said, adding that RCMP missing persons operations have improved greatly over ten years.
JOSH MASSEY PHOTO
WANDA GOOD, left, and friends and community of missing First Nations woman Lana Derrick (shown on signs) proceed rally along Keith Ave. Saturday.
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Major Midget He’s liking the hockey action that’s available in Kamloops \SPORTS B12