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At some point, we are going to recognize that we cannot maintain all of our present infrastructure. We grew it while economic conditions were expanding, most often by borrowing money. The debt was supportable as the economy grew to enable interest to be paid and taxpayers were willing to foot the bill. The economy, based on forest and fishery resources we have now largely used up, has leveled out, making debt-based investments in infrastructure more difficult to sustain. This is matched by lack of significant growth in the incomes necessary to enable taxpayers to pick up the slack from current earnings. The result of this is that tax resistance, coupled with high infrastructure maintenance demands is heading for the wall.
This is the context in which the request to support the operating deficit problems of the Cowichan Sportsplex must be considered. During the month of August, Area Directors will be polled to answer the question “are you in or out of a permanent tax function for the Sportsplex”. For all those areas that opt in, an Alternative Approval Process would then be invoked in the fall for the whole contributing area. The AAP process requires a 10% no petition to fail, a tall order over such a potentially large area and population. All it would take to commit Shawnigan taxpayers to the likelihood of a permanent charge on the tax base is for the Area Director to vote us in. An AAP over the whole region could easily swamp the desires of the Shawnigan public.
In the specific case of Shawnigan, infrastructure needs are numerous at the most basic level. They include:
• necessary renovation of Kerry Park’s aging facility
• increasing necessity of dealing with a deteriorating water quality due to aging and ailing septic fields surrounding the lake
• increasing need for a sewage treatment facility for Shawnigan Village – its most development-limiting feature
• combination of maintenance of the Shawnigan Lake Community Centre and the development of the Elsie Miles property to serve as a Shawnigan Commons
• maintenance of the recently completed Shawnigan Hills sports field facility above the Beach Estates
• rejuvenation of Shawnigan Village’s muchdeteriorated commercial centre
• maintenance and management of the increased local parkland and trail systems
• increasing local taxation for a necessary third fire hall at the south end of the lake to serve new subdivisions in that area
• the long-term objective of municipal incorporation would add a considerable increase in taxation to support roads, policing and municipal operations.
At present, a full half of Shawnigan taxpayers in the west and south are obliged to support a regional transit service that they do not get. In the recent past the weighted voting procedure of the CVRD forced Shawnigan taxpayers to support a tourism information centre in North Cowichan that was voted against by the Area Director because of its limited value to the Shawnigan area.
In these circumstances it is difficult to imagine support from the majority of Shawnigan taxpayers for discretionary infrastructure development or maintenance at a distance. It is true that Shawnigan currently accounts for approximately 11% of the Sportsplex use, likely by young people involved in team sports, making our choice even more difficult. Demands on the tax base are a bottomless pit, taxpayers pocket are not. It may be time for us to recognize limits to growth and begin to seek economies among the “nice– to-have” things in favour of the “necessary to-have” ones. We owe this difficult decision to the seniors on fixed incomes and the financially struggling young families within our midst. It is one thing to argue that the current recreational facilities are important for our life style needs and quite another to assume that we can actually afford them. The argument that “it is only a dollar per hundred thousand” wears pretty thin after hearing it repeatedly as the amounts accumulate.
The enormous contribution of volunteers and marginally paid staff to the existing Sportsplex are compelling arguments for continuing to invest and to make the costs a permanent function of local government. The further argument that the facility makes tourist-drawing major sporting events possible in our region (like the BC Summer Games) is also compelling. But those economic benefits accrue mostly to North Cowichan and Duncan who represent over 50% of the Sportsplex users. The benefits are marginal to Shawnigan taxpayers compared to the basic unmet needs in the local community that are going to be difficult enough to fund. If we do not choose to participate in the Sportsplex function now in 2012, we will have the option to reconsider in the future.
That opportunity would need to go to the Area B public for ratification in advance, as it should be, not just at the sole discretion of the Area Director at the CVRD Board table.
Perhaps the time has come to concentrate our recreation outdoors in our natural environment of lakes, rivers, parks and trails rather than in our stock of built infrastructure that is proving so expensive to maintain.