Rossland’s mayor, Kathy Moore, spent last week at the Union of B.C. Municipalities Convention in Vancouver.
Now that she’s back in Rossland, we asked her about the highlights from her week.
Rossland News: What were some of the resolutions that passed that you were excited to see move forward?
Kathy Moore: Well, you know the cannabis one is a big one because that one was asking that local governments be involved — be at the table when they’re talking about how they’re going to be regulating cannabis — and asking for some tax revenue from that. … It’s the local governments that are really going to be the ones where the pedal hits the metal. We’re the ones that if there’s any policing issues or enforcement issues or whatever, it comes down to local government. So it’s good to have us at the table.
RN: Were there any others that stuck out to you as being particularly positive?
KM: Not really. I mean there were a whole lot of initiatives that are just sort of incremental efforts to make government better and it’s always nice to see that.
One of the ones that the members of the hospital board put forward, just saying the government really needs to look at the legislation that governs hospitals and hospital boards and get some clarity on that because the legislation has been sort of fuzzy for years. Normally the hospital boards contribute 40 per cent to capital improvements of hospitals and the province covers 60, but then there’s all these kind of wishy-washy things about who does what and who’s responsible. What’s really capital versus what’s maybe more operational and more staff training or whatever. There just needs to be more clarity there and that’s something that hasn’t been looked at in years. So that was nice to see that go forward.…
The thing is I miss some of the resolution sessions because there’s always meetings with ministers that go on and sometimes they happen during resolution sessions, so I miss some of those. The same as missing some of the workshops for those same reasons, because we had meetings. The Highway 3 Mayors’ and Chairs’ Coalition had several meetings with the Minister of Transportation and the Minister of Tourism, and then the resort municipalities group also had meetings.…
RN: Were there any ministers in particular who you had a chance to meet with?
KM: Yes, I met with the Minister of Tourism, Arts & Culture, Lisa Beare. She is wonderful, just an absolute energetic dynamo of a person and she seems quite well versed in the tourism file, which is great, and quite supportive of the resort municipality initiative, which is the 14 resort municipalities that work hard to create these remarkable experiences for our visitors and a little extra — some tax money that comes to us for that. Rossland is probably the smallest on that — I think we only get about $50,000 a year, but the bigger resorts get quite a bit of money. And it really helps, because when you’re a town that caters to a lot of tourists and really the only thing you have to fund your city and its amenities are residential tax dollars, that’s really hard. Because the residents are interested in things that support the infrastructure of the town, not necessarily the tourists. So it’s nice to have that extra bit of money to help us with our signage and various other tourism initiatives that we want to do and the more we grow that tourism economy, the more money we get.…
The program has been extended to … [March 31, 2018], but we’d like to see it continue on into perpetuity because it really does help. It helps the province bring in a lot more tax dollars from visitors and it helps the communities to support those tourist visits and then it helps our visitors always to have a fantastic experience while they’re here.…
And then I also met with the Minister of Transportation with the Highway 3 Mayors’ and Chairs’ Coalition and that was good. Again that’s another new minister, who’s also very enthusiastic and intrigued by her portfolios, so that’s good. And we were talking mostly to introduce her to the Mayors’ and Chairs’ Coalition, which for Highway 3 stretches from Hope to the Alberta border and all the mayors and chairs of the regional district along the route get together and decide on priorities that are important to all of us, and that way we’ve been able to get a lot of the infrastructure improvements to the highway done, because when one minister is faced with 20 or 30 mayors and chairs and they’re all asking for four or five things, it’s easy to work on those requests, because it’s not 1,500 different people all asking for different things.…
And this time we spent quite a bit of time introducing the work that Destination BC has done on our behalf, which is the Destination Development Strategy, which is great.… The Destination Development Strategy that has been worked on in the area along the corridor for Highway 3 for most of the last year, bringing in all the different stakeholders together to look at ‘What are our tourism assets? Where are the gaps?’ What do we need from the provincial government, whether it’s the Ministry of Transportation to improve passing lanes and rest stops, to getting ubiquitous cell coverage through the whole route, or whether it’s talking to the Ministry of Tourism about what they can do to support us. It’s really good to have that group go and talk to both of those ministries.
So we did that, but this time was really just an introductory meeting with both of them because the destination strategy has not actually been released yet from Destination BC, so it’s not finalized yet. Once it’s finalized, we’ll be sharing it with the ministers.