Summertime in Central Saanich is a time when people like to play, holiday and generally take a break.
Not quite so for municipal senior staff and members of council. Even Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon has been very busy, while the Legislature is in recess, signing an order-in-council that has doubled the permitted debt threshold from 5 to 10 per cent before any electoral approval is required for major municipal projects and their borrowing funds to finance them.
So, citizens of Central Saanich, while summer plays on, your democratic rights have just been quietly stomped upon.
As the so called "public engagement process" – designed to sell you on a misguided civic redevelopment scheme -– plays out to minimal attendance (it is summer after all), you will have no right to either an alternative approval process or a referendum to democratically voice your support or lack thereof.
When I asked mayor and council (June 23) if there was any legal requirement to seek voter approval, they assured me there was no such requirement. Before Kahlon's divine intervention, Central Saanich would have been over the 5 per cent threshold, and voter approval was required.
Now with the district squeaking in at 8.9 per cent, just under the new 10 per cent threshold. No voter approval required. Poof! Like magic.
That little margin of 1.1 per cent is based on conceptual, not fully costed plans. One need only look at the typical history of large projects to know how initial costs are ultimately exceeded by cost overruns.
Then I asked mayor and council if there was any moral obligation to seek voter approval. The response was nervous and vague, and I was told that would be for individual councillors to respond according to their conscience.
No voter approval required for the district’s largest project and sale of the publicly owned land (site of current municipal, police and fire hall) to private developers for undefined high-density development in Saanichton. No voter approval required for moving the municipal hall, police and fire hall to a smaller site, now a Hovey Road hayfield, expropriated from its owners who planned to build seniors care and housing.
We neither asked for this nor were we properly consulted, and now we are told, No, you do not get a say.
To the nervous councillors who have higher political ambitions or who may seek re-election next year, your nerves and creeping anxiety are your intuition trying to tell you something: Denying the electorate their democratic right is never wise, never justified and never politically astute.
The mayor (in a letter to PNR) calls for the citizens to "move forward with clarity and compassion". The irony is just too great.
We call for the council to give pause before moving forward, but then only with the true clarity of the democratic approval of the voters whose ever-rising taxes pay for the ever-growing staff and the projects they seek to build.
Cyril Hume
Saanichton
