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Y O U R C O M M U N I T Y N E W S PA P E R • F O U N D E D I N 1 8 9 1 • W W W. T H E P R O G R E S S . C O M • F R I D AY, A P R I L 2 4 , 2 0 1 5
FVRD offers aid to Cultus Park Board
■ Y OUNG G ARDENERS
Jennifer Feinberg The Progress
Volunteer Kyleigh Harrison from Sardis secondary helps Yarrow elementary students Eli Kingscobie (right) and Myles Merchant (centre), along with friend Abram Hughes (left), make pots out of newsprint to plant sweet peas during the grand opening of the elementary school’s new garden on Saturday. The school received a grant from Farm to School B.C., plus they did some fundraising, and now the kids have an outdoor classroom consisting of seven raised garden beds, three compost bins, three strawberry gutters, a shed with whiteboards inside for teacher instruction, and big tree stump rounds for chairs. JENNA HAUCK/ PROGRESS
Hope for homeowners with European fire ants University ant expert offers some advice Jennifer Feinberg The Progress Promising research to get rid of European fire ants was of huge interest to a packed house in Chilliwack this week. The topic came up at an information session that drew a crowd of about 100 at Chilliwack secondary Wednesday night. Entomologist Robert Higgins, B.C.’s foremost expert on ants, gave a presentation to homeowners, business people and realtors. Higgins, a researcher with
Thompson Rivers University, has been helping to identify European fire ants, or EFAs, known to swarm in large numbers and bite when nests are disturbed. “Identification is a big issue for people because these ants are very tricky to identify,” Higgins told The Progress. They are small and red, characterized with two waists, and a stinger, which can be seen under a microscope. They arrived in B.C. about five years ago, and are confirmed to be present in Chilliwack.
Chilliwack residents have been shipping him specimens for identification in the past few years, and some are looking for ways to clear the nests which have made their backyards virtually unusable. The budding underground nests can have up to 20 queens and thousands of worker ants. VanDusen Botanical Gardens officials have confirmed they have the fire ants on-site, and are experimenting with trial methods to get rid of them. One of the techniques “showing some promise” at VanDusen Gardens is finding the fire ant nests, digging them out and drop-
ping them into large buckets. They are then treated with low concentration pesticides, before restoring them back in the ground. It seems to be working better than just trying to manually remove the nests and infested soil, Higgins noted. “When you dig out the nests, the queens and workers just run away through lateral escape tunnels. “So when digging them out you are missing many of the queens and workers who escape the nest only to return later and get reestablished. Continued: ANTS/ p10
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An audit of Cultus Lake Park Board operations is underway now by Fraser Valley Regional District. Park Board officials put in a formal request to FVRD recently to review their operation and offer some recommendations for the best way to move forward. As the larger local government entity, the FVRD has the expertise, ability and resources to lend a hand to the Park Board in this way, said Paul Gipps, chief administrative officer of the FVRD. “The Park Board is a small organization with limited abilities, and everything costs money.” The operational audit by FVRD staff, will include a review of the administrative structure, operations and human resources at Cultus Lake Park. Human resources management is one of those “tricky things” best left to the experts, and is not something they do at the regional district “off the side of our desks,” he said. “We have a very good system in place,” Gipps noted, along with a solid “track record” as a large local government, with experts and specialists on staff who can effectively assess the Park Board’s administrative structure. Ron Campbell, CAO of the Cultus Lake Park Board, was terminated after six years of service as senior administrator at Cultus Lake Park, following a vote by the park board in March. Shortly after the termination, the request for the operational audit was sent to the FVRD board. Cultus Lake Park Board underwent a major structural change a little more than a year ago, when provincial legislation passed reducing the board from seven to five commissioners, with three elected by Cultus residents, and two by Chilliwack residents.