Warm Water For DownTown Has the Same Smell As Warm Water For River Thaw

By Ben Meisner

Perhaps it is just me, but have you noticed that any time a very contentious issue such as the Biomass community heating system comes before Council, those people who are there to express themselves about the project find themselves a long way down the list of items before Council?

Is this by design or is it simply just the way the agenda falls? I leave up to you. When you have an issue such as this coming before Council you should have the fore thought to make certain that you don’t have people sitting around on their hands for a few hours waiting to be heard. On a normal night you can fire a gun off at City Council without hitting anyone in the gallery. But then having that gallery sit on their hands for a few hours tends to take the steam out of them and I believe that in many cases this is a designed move.

The selling job on the biomass system has been, at best, a disaster. Trying at first to say that you are going to get people to turn their old wood stoves in and receive a $250 dollar grant on a new $2500 dollar stove is a joke, but it isn’t funny.

Using that as a sales job on the public suggests that someone over at the Hall just doesn’t get it.

Before you go out and try back door selling the idea of a Biomass heating system you had better make sure that it flies on its own merit. It hasn’t.

Mayor Colin Kinsley took a trip to look at a system in Finland and from there we have tripped over ourselves trying to grab some dough from the Feds and Province so it gets the go ahead without any real plan on how it will pay for itself, what the future holds in the acquisition of bio mass, and finally addressing the question of why private industry has not bought into the idea in the down town?

Long before we come with grandiose ideas of spending our money to address the air quality of this city, we had better have the guts and conviction to go after the real culprits. This City Council has shown, as Councils in the past,  that they don’t have the jam to go there. So we hang the air quality on the average home owner and look for them to carry the can.

The hot water system is reminiscent of the warm water treatment of the Nechako River, instead of dealing with the problem of the down town, someone comes forward with an idea that will do absolutely nothing to improve the down town and City Hall falls all over them in trying to promote it.

I’m Meisner and that’s one man’s opinion

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