…whether they don’t understand or don’t care, is not the issue
Building and maintaining sewage treatment plants is absolutely the responsibility of local governments whether they do it themselves, or delegate it to some other entity, it is a core responsibility of local government to ‘take care of our sh*t’.
The three North Shore councils gave control to a regional entity where they have only 8% of the vote. That does not lessen their accountability to the community. It meant they had to be that much more vigilant.
Our governments seemed to assume that the day-to-day decision makers and management at Metro Vancouver would do their job for them, but why would they when the project was important to such a small minority of its stakeholders.
There were two dull-witted Councillors, one from the City, another from the District (me and Alan Nixon), who did raise concerns about the project when it was just getting started in a letter to the North Shore News entitled “Our Nasty ‘P3’: paying for the poop plant”.
Our letter elicited a blistering, and frankly rather mean-spirited, rebuttal entitled “Waste waters muddied with misinformation” from Mayor Corrigan of Burnaby, an influential voice at Metro Vancouver and the informal leader of the NDP-affiliated Mayors caucus, which City of North Vancouver Mayors are junior members.
While he called us “ignorant”, “ideological” and “intentionally disingenuous”, that’s just the usual ‘sticks and stones of politics. Other comments in his letter were a crystal clear signal that Metro Vancouver was not going to be looking out for the interests of North Vancouver.
A lawyer by training, Corrigan laid out a version of history we assume was representative of the views of Metro Vancouver leadership. According to this view, positions taken by the City and District governments in past discussions about region-wide cost sharing meant North Vancouver’s interests did not merit much consideration.
And with only 6% of the votes, that was always going to be true. But according to Corrigan “the shoe is on the other foot” and whatever bad things happened to North Vancouver were probably deserved.
I doubt even he could have imagined the scale of the billion dollar bungle that we have ended up with today. To some extent, that North Vancouver continues to send its two, rarely coordinated and invariably politically opposed, Mayors of North Vancouver is contributing to the problem.
There have been times, at Chamber of Commerce meetings, that the two Mayors have been able to make light of the incongruity of the situation, but there is a non-zero chance that North Vancouver’s fragmented representation has cost the community hundreds of millions, over a billion dollars, of future financial capacity to maintain and upgrade its infrastructure.
Nobody is laughing now.