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Ser ving
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22th r e b o t c O 2014 Vo
Pre-election Q&A begins this week
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Local cyclist Steve O’Shaughnessy doubles his son Jasper in style on his fat bike in downtown Invermere. Fat bikes were originally developed for riding on snow and have been showing up all over the valley. Expect to see plenty more this winter. PHOTO BY DAN WALTON
MP Wilks wins Tory nomination hands-down
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Invermere mayor challenged LOCAL NEWS Lake activist spreads local knowledge on Jumbo stance STEVE HUBRECHT steve@invermerevalleyecho.com The topics of Jumbo Glacier Resort and Jumbo Glacier Mountain Resort Municipality continue to generate discussion in the valley after an Invermere resident questioned Invermere mayor Gerry Taft’s stance on the municipality at the most recent Invermere council meeting. Brandishing a copy of the October 1st Valley Echo and referencing its front page story about Mr. Taft’s motion at the recent Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) meeting criticizing municipalities without residents at the October 14th Invermere council meeting, audience member Mike Gagne pointedly asked Mr. Taft why he introduced such a motion. “How does it benefit Invermere to take these (anti-Jumbo municipality) positions?” said Mr. Gagne. Mr. Taft responded that the motion grew out of his frustration at what he sees as the discrepancy between the province saying it doesn’t have enough money to help fund municipal projects such as Invermere’s new multi-use centre and the province then giving $200,000 a year in grant money to Jumbo municipality, as well as his belief that the process of creating Jum-
bo municipality was wrong. “When you fundamentally disagree with something, you should stand up for it,” said Mr. Taft. “Whether or not you agree with having a ski resort up there, there’s no question in my mind that setting that up should follow the same process that other ski resorts in the East Kootenay have been through, with rezoning decisions made by elected officials at the regional district.” Mr. Taft said that in making the motion at the UBCM meeting, he was simply doing what the majority of his constituents would support him doing on the Jumbo issue. “I do believe I’m representing the majority of the people in the district on this. People come up to me all the time and say ‘thank you’,” he said, clarifying that his chief concern is Jumbo municipality and the processes behind its creation, rather than the planned Jumbo resort. “My issue is around the municipality,” said Mr. Taft. “I’ve done everything I can do to raise awareness about how more than $1 million of public money is being spent to set up a municipality in order to circumvent the normal regional district zoning process that other ski areas in the East Kootenay go through. See A3
STEVE HUBRECHT steve@invermerevalleyecho.com Valley resident Kat Hartwig was in Ottawa earlier this month representing the Living Lakes Canada team at the Living Waters Rally, a conference that in Hartwig’s opinion highlighted the importance of the water stewardship work done here, particularly by the Lake Windermere Ambassadors. “We are definitely leading the emerging trend of communities engaging more actively with the health of their watersheds,” said Hartwig in a press release. “We are blessed in the Columbia Basin to have some of the world’s most pristine waters and thus a global obligation to protect them and restore them.” The rally, which ran from Friday, October 3rd to Monday, October 6th, attracted 110 delegates representing different groups from across Canada to discuss watershed issues. “It was mostly a way to connect various watershed groups from across the country to share information about what they’re doing,” Hartwig told The Echo. “There was a lot of talk about citizen-base science and an exchange of some of the challenges and solutions it entails.” The Lake Windermere Ambassadors’ Lake Windermere project, which grew out of a 2004 conference held at Fairmont Hot Springs, has become a model for watershed management not only for other lakes and rivers in the Columbia Basin, but also for bodies of water across the country, including Lake Winnipeg and Lake Mackenzie, said Hartwig. The key traits of the Lake Windermere project that others wish to emulate are citizen-based science and multi-sector community engagement, according to Hartwig. “There was consensus (when the Lake Windermere project started) that if we were serious about protecting the health of our water, it needed to be a collaborative approach, not just something done by an environmental group,” she said, adding that meant including local business groups, societies, individual businesses and other groups. Watershed-wide management — as opposed to simply managing a single lake or a single river — was another major topic of discussion at the rally, according to Hartwig. See A3