“(It’s) an example of us ‘telling our story’ and sending out the positive messages about what a wonderful place for living, working, and investing Prince George is – we need to start getting that message out “

I do not believe that that message has not been gotten out. In fact, by now people who have beeen responsible for this should have a lot of good feedback of what the challenges are in actually getting businesses to come here rather than Nanaimo, Kamloops, etc. Not only that, but we should have implementation plans which are activated.

So, are these big secrets? Are they proprietary information which have to be kept from the general public because other communities will steal them?

What is going on when it comes to “selling” PG? What’s the plan? Not just dribs and drabs here and there.

My age group in our 30’s has declined by 70% in the last 15-years. This is the age group that is in the prime of their working lives and contribute to population growth by having growing families. My PGSS grad class had less then 5% who still lived in PG at our ten year reunion.

When that demographic declines by 70% you have a sick city where nemesis isn’t far off on the horizon.

PG is lucky in that most of the decline in the family demographic has been made up by the large increase in the 55+ demographic. Problem is the 55+ are not spending on big items like new houses, nor are they producing more children, and soon they will be dieing off.

End result is PG will die off with the 55+ generation to a much smaller city in the next 15-year horizon… Likely in the 45,000 range that is more reflective of a 13,000 population of the family bearing demographic… the tax burden for the families that stay will be horrendous with a population sized down similar to what our schools have seen.

Loosing 20,000 plus of the family demographic is no surprise when one sees PG has almost no night club entertainment, a bad reputation in the media for crime, and we have lost a half dozen large industrial plants that employ hundreds.

IMO PG has no vision of reality (we cry wolf often when it comes to economic development) that creates a perception of real opportunity for families that would consider moving here… so they leave to communities where they want to live and most become great assets to the communities they move to.

I agree with some of what you say Eaglestone. It would be a shame to not take advantage of all the economic activity all around us. PG should be the hub of all that activity as the infastructure of the smaller communities can not handle what is coming their way.

Clean streets, treed streets with level sidewalks and sidewalks where there aren’t any at all, storm drains instead of deep ditches, vertically straight street signs and traffic signs, proper and well-lit pedestrian crossings…- plus clean air and clean water (!), removal of seemingly abandoned and dilapidated business and private structures, properly lit bus shelters and bus shelters where there arent’t any at all…a lengthy list can be made in just a few minutes! And of course there are the other challenges which appear to be beyond the capacity of those in charge to ever get a handle on: Potholed and cracked, patched and patched over again streets! Chewed up curbs, never repaired in decades! After allowing too many of these things to be put on the back burner in favour of more glitzy high profile expensive items the city is stuck with the inevitable results.

Is Prince George a “wonderful” place for living and working? It’s not a bad place if one is willing to tolerate and even ignore some of the glaring evidence of disrepair and neglect! The people are great and way more friendly than in many other cities. That’s a giant plus!

However, promoting it the way it was done by the people above is a waste of good lipstick put on, well…a bit of a pig!

Bang on Prince George!!!

Prince George:
That is some pleasant thinking but apparently PG has to build a dyke and buy more property.

Here is how the City of PG attracts new business.

“You must setup shop downtown.”

People in the rest of the Province like to drink fluoride free water. So start with that Shari.

Crime Capital of Canada! That sure attracts families.

Tax hikes and more tax hikes is another way.

promoting it the way it was done by the people above is a waste of good lipstick put on, well…a bit of a pig!

covered it all what else can be said. But rembemer that Kamloops and Nanaimo were onece holes like P.G. Every thing looks great and positive,untell we remove our rose coloured glasses.

The big story is the continuing trend towards the creation of mega cities. Greater vancouver continues to outpace growth elsewhere so it appears the province`s `heartland economic strategy`has failed. Or perhaps it has worked.

More money is flowing from the resource rich areas to pay for services in the lower mainland. They need the money from our resources to pay for things like roofs on sports facilities (ie BC Place) and for convention centres (that should be paid for by the private sector) and for big transportation projects like rapid transit and new bridges. Nice to see their quality of life improving.

We should break away from BC and create a new country and keep the revenue so that we actually have money to fix our roads, take care of our air and water and have enough cops to get off the most dangerous city list.

I do not buy Eagleone’s demographic argument. Those are the demographics in Canada as well.

BUT, as the headlines in the Vancouver Sun state:
“Census 2011: Canada’s population booms thanks to immigration”

And we all know what that means, I think. Immigrants go mainly to the large urban centres – Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal. I am not sure of the increases in Calgary and Edmonton, which do lead the large metro centres, but may be due more to internal migration.

“Canada’s population of 33.5 million people is growing faster than that of any other G8 nation — fuelled primarily by immigration — while the booming West continues to reshape this country’s demographic landscape, a new census has revealed.”

So, given that, the notion of pushing PG onto consulates in Vancouver might sound appropriate. I wonder how much the mayor and the acting manager of IPG know about the characteristic of those countries and their immigrants that they think will sell them on PG instead of the GVRD, Vancouver Island and Kelowna.

Maybe we need to gold plate some of our paving stones outside of the Court House, take a picture with the smiling faces of some immigrants who have settled in PG and create a poster with the caption “Come to Prince George, Capital of Northern British Columbia where the streets as still paved with Gold”.

;-)

Obviously if people were given a choice of where to reside they would choose the city with 6 months of winter and air quality warnings.

Well, since I am just a country boy, I don’t see this obsession with the notion any place NEEDS more people. Seems we have more people than the earth can support comfortably now. Time people stopped trying to make PG the metropolis it isn’t and just focus on getting it into shape as the medium size town it should be, with enough diversity in employment to keep the working demographic happy. Forget mega million dollar projects to attract hordes of people from the big citys. Leave them there I say. The bigger the citys the more room there is for everyone outside of them to play.

Middle finger – one just has to look at the growth of Fort St John, Grande Prairie or Fort McMurray to see the well paying jobs can overcome weather concerns.

But – To paraphrase the words of the great civic planner Mr. Dylan- If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

NoWay:”People in the rest of the Province like to drink fluoride free water. So start with that Shari.”

Well, I sent her an email with explanations and requested politely that this harmful practice be stopped right now!
I give her credit for rather than ignoring me she actually answered promptly.However, without addressing any of the valid objections to medicating our tap water she simply wrote that she supports fluoridation.

Back to square one! By the way, 97% of all B.C. residents are already enjoying fluoride addition FREE tap water, safe to drink and shower with! We (of course) belong to the last 3% who are being subjected to this failed medical experiment to which none of us has ever given written consent!

Clean air in Prince George? A difficult and expensive task.

Clean water in Prince George? An easy and money-saving task!

Just shut the hexafluorosilicic (sodium fluoride) injection pumps off!

There is plenty of fluoride in toothpaste and in fluoride varnish treatments at the dentist’s office.

Next time when I get wind of one of those international high profile feel good promoting Prince George meetings in Vancouver I will show up with a large sign warning all those who are already enjoying fluoride addition free water to stay the heck away from Prince George!

We are getting a new cancer clinic. Yet, we are intentionally polluting our water with sodium fluoride (main ingredient in rat poison) and mercury, lead and arsenic which come with it!

Lonesome Sparrow – or busy living.

In regards to the above story.
How much of the growth mentioned for Kamloops & Nanaimo is due to new industry?, or is it the 55+ demograhics that are retiring to those cities,from other parts of the province and Canada.

A word to Ms Green & Ms Oland.
Make sure your own house is in order,before you waste taxpayers money trying to promote PG.

Since the city has a developer pay policy.
You should look at how long it takes for city hall to process and approve,plans & permits for development.
If it is not done in a timely matter or is a drawn out process.It becomes a costly and expensive endeavor for the person or business trying locate or build here.
Which equals to a bad experience.
Word of a bad experience travels faster then one of a good experience.

You may have the best outside salesperson
selling. But unless they have efficient backup,all is for not.

Lonesome Sparrow: I agree, 6 months of winter, stinky but this is where I make my living.

” If your not busy being born, your busy dying”…..so PG needs to to be impregnated ?

I fail to see how a dyke will help with that. :)

Gus if you go back 20-years and take the demographic of the teens and then move it forward through to the 30-40 range of today… PG has lost over 20,000 people in that demographic group. They are the demographic that lost faith in PG and left town. Its not about the aging population because they once existed here in PG in that demographic group, but have since left.

But- I bet to differ, another way to describe busy living is stagnation and the resulting downward spiral…something that many residents will recognize in our fair community.

My point was, just because we aren’t growing in leaps and bounds doesnt’ mean the city is doomed. If we feel we have to have large increases in population in order to have a comfortable and nice place to live then we truly are doomed. I think PG should focus it’s efforts and planning on what we are and not what some people think we should be.

How about a new slogan? Come for the overpaid jobs, stayed for the unpriced housing!

But seriously, lack of new residents in the north is not for lack of economic opportunity. It’s a quality of life issue – something the current council doesn’t seem to think is very important.

But I agree with your post. I think the City should stop wasting time trying to “grow” the City by an influx of new people. The City should concentrate on making it a good City for those that already live here and then maybe, just maybe more will follow when they see that PG treats it’s residents well.

Eagleone, what you describe as people in that age demographic as “the demographic that lost faith in PG and left town.” doesn’t make sense to me. Current trends in demographics show that your age group is much smaller than the baby boomers. That is one reason why there are less of you. Also, I think the mindset of your age cohort is much different than that of the baby boomers and the generation before them. GenX has seen all the wonderful opportunities that are out there in the world and has taken the world up on them. I think the baby boomer generation has encouraged their children to get out and see the world (I know I certainly will). So there’s another reason your age demographic has left town; to explore what’s out there.

One can hope that the current group of civic leaders will take a different approach to achieve this “growth”.

It makes a great photo op to have the mayor of the day stand in front of some Grand Plan to redevelop the entire core, only to have it tucked in a drawer till the next Grande` Plan plan comes along.

In the City’s 2010 annual report they say, ” In 2012–There will be significant subscription to the Downtown Incentives Program” ….k guys, it’s 2012, time for the big unveil(cop shop and WIC don’t count as not private money)The Keg doesn’t count either.

Time to take a few baby steps and actually get something done. Fix a curb, plant some trees, but DO something.

I agree we should not have to grow the city by numbers but we do have to grow the city by quality.

Growing the city by numbers simply means you are chasing after the cost of growth. It is not a sustainable approach. It is the key problem of North Ameerica. Generally speaking North Amrica has not been taking care of its infrastructure.

This city is not all that unique, other than it has not grown in numbers for some 20 years and at least 3, and now the 4th, successive mayors and their councils have been unable to face the fact that they have not put enough into maintaining infrastructure. THAT is the story here. That is the problem to overcome.

We have doubled the width of two bridges and the approaches to them during a time when this city was not growing in numbers.

We replaced a single lane wooden bridge with a double laned bridge at this city’s expense when this city was not growing and a bridge less than a km upstream was doubled in width. We effectively went from 3 lanes to 6 lanes crossing the Nechako from downtown to the Hart. We could have used that federal and provincial money for 2 of those lanes somewhere else.

We spent several hundred thousand dollars to design a neighbourhood where a dying golf course sits that was unable to pay for that itself or cause parties interested in buying the property to pay for it as is the normal case. We doid that at the very time when we began to realize that we had been allowing a city to sprawl futher and further out from the centre at a greater and greater opertaing and maintenance cost and said we will stop doing that. Yet, like a dope addict on speed, we were unable to change our habits.

What we need is a serious talk with our City psychiatrist to get some serious help in changing our ways.

We had a dose of that with the help of some provincial funding that gave us the “smart growth” process. But that was all to no avail.

We are like most cities in North America; hooked on population growth.

Population growth is the only way they think they can control tax increases. More people sharing the burden. Otherwise we scream for their heads to roll.

Of course looking inward at sky rocketing wages for little work done and wasteful “studies” is out of the question.

:-/

No one will ever ‘want’ to live here, it is & always has been a glorified camp.

“More people share the burden”

Okay, the more people there are, the more the burden has to increase. On cannot run a city of 100,000 on the infrastructure for 75,000.

The quickest examples are fire protection and police protection which are the two largest single costs. Both basically go up incrementally with population.

Also remember that when one has new businesses which require skilled tradespeople, many of the multiplier jobs coming out of that are low skilled service jobs such as fast food and retail.

The profile of the community will likely change more toward lower cost housing, rental units, etc. than being representative of the current mix we have. I suspect we will have to have 700 new people come into town in order to get the same taxes as 500 people currently pay through the properties they live on.

All I am saying is that to see the net benefit to the community of getting additional people in a community to share those costs may not be one expects from a simple calculation. One really needs to have a numerical model of some indicators to run various scenarios through.

One thinkg I do know, if we stick to true infill rather than additional subdivision development as we are continuing to do as of this day, then we have a chance of reaping a benefit of adding people to share the load.

BUT, that has been an impossible goal for Council to stick to.

1. City of Vancouver = 5,249 people/km2
2. Surrey = 1,479
3. Burnaby = 2,463
4. Burnaby = 2,463
5. Richmond = 1,473
6. Abbotsford = 355
7. Coquitlam = 1,033
8. Kelowna = 553
9. Saanich = 1,057
10. Langley = 338
11. Delta = 554
12. Kamloops = 286
13. North Vancouver = 525
14. Nanaimo = 917
15. Victoria = 4,109
16. Chilliwack = 298
17. Maple Ridge = 285
18. Prince George = 226

That is a list of the population of ciies in BC in descending order. PG is now number 18. All of our peer cities (similar sized cities) are included in that list.

Of that group we are the least densely populated. In my opinion, that increases the operations and maintenance cost. Again, that is measurable, and I would love to see the figures on that to see whether I am mistaken.

I hope the services review will look into that aspect of city operations.

without knowing the size of the area that is considered city limits those numbers don’t mean a lot. If Kamloops has a larger service area than PG by a greater percentage than the differnce in pop density then Kamloops is actually worse off than PG as far as tax base to pay for costs.

Tax dollarswill never grow this city. It will keep on shrinking. Its as has been pointed out . Get on with the maintenance of our infrastructure. Stop living in this dream world of bigger is better. As the City grows our cost of living will also grow and who wants that.

The city is ripping us off with higher taxes and so are the merchants. There appears to be no end to the ever higher cost of living.
Cheers

“without knowing the size of the area that is considered city limits those numbers don’t mean a lot”

But we do know the size of the City limits. They are well defined legal boundaries. The city is repsonsible for maintaining the areas within those boundaries. Some of the areas have differnt characteristics. In our case, some of them are forested and require fire protection as much, if not more, than areas which are easily accessible by road. Imagine a fire on the Cranbrook Hill escarpment, for instance, most of which is publicly owned. There are still dead trees standing in that area which have not been removed and could easily go up in flames with a human or nature caused fire.

As a result of a less dense populated area, we also have a lot of rural properties. It takes much more road to service the property with 5 acres or even an acre than it does a three storey apartment building. It takes even less if the road to that apartment is also a collector road and services much more than the apartment. Thus a 12 storey apartment on 15th east of Central is much more efficient when it comes to servicing than a 3 storey apartment in heritage subdivision where the road services that apartment plus a few single family houses.

When looking at that, consider such costs as pavement, street lighting, fire hydrants, road sweeping and snow removal, travel distances to firehalls, RCMP traffic patrol, etc. etc.

It is true that one could have a very large city legal area wise while having a very concentrated built up area. However, this city is far removed from that.

PG has one of the highest detached single family dwelling count per total dwelling units in the country.

I like to refer to it as living in a 1960/70’s bubble. It’s nice in many ways, but it comes at a price.

Two things. One.Change the name “Prince George” to something else,anything else. Being named after a prince implies were second best.

Two.Change its motto “BC’s Northern Capital”. This also implies were second best.

Eagleone wrote:
“Gus if you go back 20-years and take the demographic of the teens and then move it forward through to the 30-40 range of today… PG has lost over 20,000 people in that demographic group”

I will try to show you where the fallacy in your analysis is eagleone.

I looked at the 1986 community profile census data for the Prince George CA and compared that to 2006 since the 2011 community profile demographic data has not been published yet. It also gives the 20 year you referenced.

I have selected the under 20 cohort, the 20 to 64 cohort which find the majority of working age people and the 65 and older group.

In 1986
0-19 = 35.9% of the total population
20-64 = 60.1%
65+ = 3.9%

In 2006
0-19 = 26.8%
20-64 = 63.7%
65+ = 9.4%

For BC over the same time period
In 1986
0-19 = 27.7%
20-64 = 60.2%
65+ = 12.1%

In 2006
0-19 = 23.2%
20-64 = 62.3%
65+ = 14.6%

Some things to note from those figures, at least as I see it.

1.The population is aging in both BC and PG; I think we all knew that

2.The demographics in PG look very close to the demographics of the province 20 years ago. As I said, we live in a bubble and we have more time to adjust than many other communities.

3.Rather than the cohort from 20 to 64 decreasing, it actually increased as a percentage of total population. In other words, the number of people available to support the young and the elderly, if that is the way to look at it, has actually increased slightly.

So, why is that? Neither PG nor BC are closed vessels. They are all part of a state of equilibrium in an open and inclusive globe. We have births, deaths, in-migration and out-migration all of which have an influence on the demographic profile. Canada has been like that ever since the first settler arrived to populate this country. We are a country dependent on immigration. It is in our make-up. We know no different. It is a country of riches and the world has wanted them right from the start. That is why people came in the first place.

There are people that have come and there are people that have left over those 20 years. The fact is that as long as there are jobs, people in the 20 to 64 cohort will continue to come here if the conditions are right for them. In fact, the people who come here in that age group are the same as all other people these days; they come with smaller families or will have smaller families if they do not already have one.

If the jobs are those which have to happen here because the resources are here, then we do not have to do much to attract them. The businesses who need access to those resources will take care of getting workers, even to the extent of getting government to accept so-called foreign workers.

That is what I call “natural” growth from outside economic forces.

To grow a city population wise from inside is far different. While there must be an economic driver to foster that kind of growth, I believe there must also be a social or lifestyle driver to cause a city to grow or even survive.

I think without senior government interest in that vision and willingness to help one is virtually dead in the water right from the start.

Quite frankly, I have seen nothing from senior government that shows that they are in any way interested in growing this city for any other reason than to access the natural resources around it.

When it comes to a BC decentralization policy, there is none that I am aware of. They are happy to continue uncontrolled growth in prime domestic agricultural land. PG is not even a blip on anyone’s radar from the point of view of decentralization of the population of the province.

We are on our own and it is our dime.

Good post PrinceGeorge you’re right on the money.

And then we have Palopu who keeps thinking that we are suckling on the teats of senior governments to improve our infrastructure here.

A valid observation on his part and a valid reason to do it on the part of this City. At the moment, it is the only way to survive.

Gus I read a realestate/labor market study for PG a while back that had the population break down by 10-year cohorts and it had charts that showed the changing demographic over 5-year increments. It stood out right away the huge drop in population of my cohorts in my age bracket. I will try to find a source, but it was government is all I can remember right now… don’t have access to my office today, but I probably filed it away there though.

The statistics of working age population wouldn’t see this as the cohorts above my age bracket actually grew making up for much of the shortfall and both would fall into the working age population.

I found it an interesting stat because that is where one looks if they wish to set up a business here in PG. They want to know is the demographic for the young adult healthy and growing, or in decline… in PG it is in decline and for retail or residential home construction this is often the decider for getting the go on a project.

As I remember it most of the decline happened in the late 90’s when the softwood lumber issue had most economists lighting their hair on fire about the prospects for youth in the area. Once they left most never did return and I think it hurt PG in the long run. I think we’d be a city well over 90,000 now had PG not gone through the late 90’s in such bad shape and had we been able to retain some of our forestry jobs we had back then.