K
I
T
I
M
A
Sentinel
T
Northern
www.northernsentinel.com
Volume 61 No. 40
Confidence in BC Housing lacking Cameron Orr The proponent behind an affordable housing plan in Kitimat successfully received a council letter of support to help them secure funding through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, but the conversation also pointed to rifts between a local housing society and BC Housing. As per BC Housing’s website, they’re described as a Crown corporation which provides assistance to renters and emergency and subsidized housing for low income families and the disabled. Mountain View Housing Society, which seeks to build affordable living units neighbouring the Mountain View Alliance Church, is working with the municipality and with local industrial proponents to develop housing in a way that opens affordable units to the community, but the group’s spokesperson, Pastor Don Read, said they’ve had little success with the B.C. Crown corporation. “BC Housing is broken,” Read told Kitimat Council an a public meeting. “Working with BC Housing...there’s so much red tape and so much broken promises and so many meetings that are promised that they don’t show up to that I would be hard pressed to say [they’re] even a viable option.” He said it’s night an day for how BC Housing works versus CMHC. “We spent eight months working with BC Housing and we received nothing. We filled out a form for CMHC grant money and that was last week, and we’ll know within two weeks whether we have the grant money or not. That’s the difference,” he said. BC Housing was contacted for a response to these comments and the Sentinel was awaiting word by press deadline. Continued on page 9
Grassroots health support in Kitamaat Village /page 8 Wrestling a passion for former Kitimatian
/page 12 PM477761
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
$
1.30 INCLUDES TAX
The wonderful, gross world of science Students at Kitimat City High were given a hands-on lesson on aquatic life when the travelling AquaVan, a program of the Vancouver Aquarium, arrived in Kitimat. The program has various school events running through to October 11. Shown here are students participating in a dissection of a squid, some students a little more thrilled at the hands-on part than others. Cameron Orr
Time will tell if Kitimat gets piece of $75M When the Union of British Columbia Municipalities came to the end of their week-long conference the Premier, as usual, issued a concluding speech. The substance of the speech varies year to year but this time around Christy Clark made a promise to smaller communities that they would share in $75 million to diversify their economies. Clark emphasized the outsized contribution of small resource communities to the provincial economy, and said the extra help is made possible by the B.C. government’s spending control that has left three straight budget surpluses. A $75 million “rural dividend” will be available over three years to communities of fewer than 25,000 people that are outside urban areas. The fund is to diversify local economies, but details won’t be released until March 2016. Kitimat Mayor Phil Germuth, who together with fellow councillors met with
the Premier and her ministers during the course of UBCM, said her speech to the delegates was the first time he was aware of the funding plan. Time will show how Kitimat, where the population currently hovers around 9,000, will benefit from the rural dividend. Even so, Germuth said his council had a notably large amount of time to spend in a meeting with the Premier as councillors spoke of programs in our community, and it’s a meeting he felt went very well. One area of improvement for Kitimat, which he found speaking to a project proponent early in the week, was that there are still challenges in making Kitimat an attractive place to move for work. “It seems once they get here they see how beautiful it is and then they don’t mind it,” said Germuth. “We just maybe need to do a better job of advertising Kitimat out there.”
Infrastructure issues were a priority for Kitimat at the conference and Germuth says the community is still waiting for the West Side Corridor Study, due in approximately a month, that will take a solid look at transportation issues through Kitimat. Germuth said he’s hoping the report will ultimately show there’s a pressing need for not just a repair of Haisla Bridge but a replacement for one as well. A replacement would certainly need multiple levels of support, with a price tag that could be in the range of $35 million, he said, but the time is now to build. “[The province] wants to wait until an FID [Final Investment Decision] maybe, however to be honest right now would be the time, when you have RTA ramping down big time and before you have an LNG FID then all of a sudden things are crazy busy again.” Continued on page 9