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{ Tag Archives } Municipal Politics

Eddie’s Pit and Biochar

While the “Burning at Eddie’s Pit” story is quite an interesting tale of a classic Catch 22 it has also brought to the forefront a whole series of discussions about waste management and CO2 reduction.

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Where will the money come from?

“Addicted to Development” is a phrase that may describe our current municipal condition. Between 2001 and 2010 our budget will have grown by at least twice as much as our taxes have increased. Our island municipality is spending about 8% more every year than it did the year before – but our property tax goes [...]

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The Sewer is coming – honest

Last Monday night Municipal Council considered a proposal, prepared by staff, which outlined how we could provide the $712,000 that our municipality will have to invest in the Snug Cove sewer upgrade. Of course council didn’t approve it. They deferred their decision until after more community consultation. But this time the good old deferral trick [...]

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A “True Green” Perspective

What Does it Mean to be “Green” on Bowen?
 In the spring of 2008 fourteen islanders, selected by Council, sat around tables in Municipal Hall and began to answer this question. They came from a variety of backgrounds, with expertise in climate change solutions, social justice, green buildings, affordability, waste reduction and ecosystem protection – approaches [...]

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Ideas for the OCP Update

The committee that’s working on updating our Official Community Plan (OCP) asked all of the various groups on the island to submit ideas for a forum that they held a couple of weeks ago. More than twenty submissions have been posted on the bowenocpupdate website. Taken as a whole, they provide an excellent insight into [...]

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Elinor’s Message For Bowen

Elinor Ostrom just won the Nobel Prize for economics. If this momentous occasion slipped by without you taking much notice, I’m sure that you weren’t alone. But Elinor is a radical. She has rocked the world of economic theory by showing how people are not just units of consumption, taking as much as they can [...]

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Upcoming Columns

Rarely, sitting down to write a column do I find that there is too much to write about. But I’ve just returned from holidays and find that there are a myriad of interesting things happening. This isn’t going to be a column per se but more a collection of random thoughts and a preview of [...]

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Moving Forward

As we move along with the updating of our Official Community Plan (OCP) it is probably worthwhile to look back on how well the plan has served us to date and what we might to do to make it more usable in the future. The first thing that we have to acknowledge is that there [...]

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Island Notes

Last week the Cape Roger Curtis (CRC) developers filed a subdivision application with the municipality. I haven’t seen it yet but I am very curious. As some of you may already know CRC is a 640-acre parcel of land on the southwest tip of Bowen. The developers who own it recently went to some lengths [...]

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Debatable Issues

There are two things happening this month that you might care about. The first is the great plastic field debate on Saturday the 17th. The municipality had almost agreed to partially fund a synthetic turf field at the school but, just before they gave final approval last summer, a number of people spoke out against [...]

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