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Northern
www.northernsentinel.com
Volume 61 No. 10
Golf club still one in the hole
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
1.30 INCLUDES TAX
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A more reasonable budget will hopefully carry club through
Cameron Orr The Hirsch Creek Golf and Winter Club is expecting a few months of profit through the upcoming summer but are still seeking financial support from the District of Kitimat. One of the club’s main priorities is to bring themselves back to revenue neutral over the next three years, which will be accomplished through increasing membership fees and more revenues through food sales and room rentals, for instance. Meanwhile though the club thinks they’ll be short over the 2015 season, to the tune of about $160,000 in their operations and maintenance budget, as well as being in an overdraft position on their finances which cause significant charges. Council listened to the club’s presentation at a recent meeting but no decisions have yet been made on what, if anything, the town will offer. Meanwhile the club president Robin Lapointe says the new club board has been taking a more realistic approach to how they develop their budget, where past budgets have been established artificially, he said. The arbitrary style of budgeting hasn’t been sustainable and the current board has put forward what they feel is reasonable in the operations and maintenance budget. It will come with about three months — February to April — of being in the red, which is a result partly of the capital investments to bring their kitchen back in to operation, which now offers weeknight dinners and after-8 appetizers for the curling crowd. Continued on page 7
Weir’s rescuers given GG bravery medal. /page 9 Kitimat’s Almeida takes to Winter Games. /page 9
Above, Rob Goffinet speaks to striking Unifor members before opting to not cross the line at Monday’s council meeting. Below, Mayor Phil Germuth speaking to union representatives at the same council meeting. Cameron Orr
Union, town still divided The situation between the town and its employees didn’t soften any after a picket line rally in front of the council chambers Monday night ahead of a regular meeting. Unifor 2300 members held the line at the doorways to the facility, which is the Kitimat campus of the Northwest Community College, shouting “Shame” to passing exempt District employees on their way in. Three councillors, Rob Goffinet, Edwin Empinado and Claire Rattée, did not attend the meeting, opting not to conduct business by passing through the line. That left the remaining councillors, Larry Walker, Mario Feldhoff, Mary Murphy and Mayor Phil Germuth to face several dozen workers who
later packed the chambers, as well as a presentation from Unifor’s Martin McIlwrath and Jeremy Dos Santos. The pair went through their concerns regarding bargaining, from issues not addressed to wrong information being released in the public. “The bigger issue is the poisonous work environment,” said McIlwrath. The work environment is a problem that’s been ongoing for years and he said it didn’t change in any notable way since the new chief administrative officer Ron Poole took the job just shy of four years ago. “We put out the olive branch back and said Friday ‘listen, this [offer] doesn’t address the issues that we’re trying to change in the workplace, but
we’re willing to work through the night, all night, all day, whatever we can to get a deal done,’” said McIlwrath. “Instead you guys went to the media and started individually e-mailing our members try to promote a deal, your final offer, trying to make it sound like it was the best offer ever made. So you were trying to perhaps cause a mutiny or something within our union but all you did was anger our members because these are their issues.” “We feel we made a fair final offer,” shot back Germuth once McIlwrath finished. “We are willing to work through the terms of a collective agreement to address all the issues that couldn’t be addressed immediately.” Germuth says he stands behind the ad-
ministration and the bargaining committee. “We gave them full direction, we know what we’re putting out there and we trust that we’ve put out facts,” he added. The two did come at odds to what was in the most recent offer, McIlwrath saying the mayor’s comments on
a CBC radio broadcast earlier were inaccurate. Germuth had told a CBC interviewer that the lowest person on the pay scale would see a 15 per cent raise, but that came from an older, dropped wage demand from earlier in negotiations, said McIlwrath. Continued on page 2