Russ Barling
for mayor

For 12 years I worked as a business and foreign-news journalist for the some of the world’s biggest and most respected newspapers in London and Hong Kong. These included the South China Morning Post, Asia’s biggest English-language daily outside of India, and the Guardian.

As a business writer, my primary focuses were transportation, energy and logistics.

In 2007, the corporate sector came calling. I spent the next six years as the head of communications for Lloyd’s Register in the Asia Pacific and Group Media Manager based in London.

In 2013, I returned to Canada and set up Scripto Communication. I’ve spent the past 12 years advising multinational corporations in the Energy and Transport sectors on strategic communications, thought leadership, media engagement and crisis management. Based in the U.S. and Europe, my clients all had annual revenues near or above US$1bn.

For fun, I program and host the Sweet Spot, a radio show for discerning jazz fans, at the VIU-sponsored CHLY (101.7FM). The show has run every Saturday morning (10am-noon) for the past six years.

I love be-bop, especially the small-band version from 1950-65 and all Canadian artists dedicated to that type of music. I like to kid that the Sweet Spot is Vancouver Island's only official Kenny Gee-free zone.Tune in, turn on and bop out.

Last year, 22% of your residential tax payments were shipped to the CVRD; for me, that’s about $900 for my primary place of residence, or a month’s worth of my pension. It is reasonable to ask what you get in return for that significant contribution. For me, it’s some recycling and options for walking my dog.

In 1967 when arbitrary boundaries were drawn to form the CVRD, most of Ladysmith was included. It is time for us to revisit that. We need to re-examine whether a closer relationship with Nanaimo would present more opportunities for our community.

In a waterfront town such as ours, it is reasonable to assume that there are tourism-related opportunities in our future. But they won’t come from Duncan; they’ll come from the airport, the ferry and the Cruise terminal, which are all in Nanaimo.

Nanaimo is the economic engine for the central island. We’d be foolish not to try to capture more of its potential.

I use Qualicum Beach for this comparison because it offers a similar population base (ToL 8,990 vs QB 9,303) and geographic location. Both generated around $13 million in tax revenue. In Ladysmith, 74% of that came from residential taxpayers.

Staff costs were $6.85m in Ladysmith, or an average of $762 for each resident. In Qualicum staff costs removed $623 from each resident’s pocket. The annual wages for Qualicum’s Council, which has five elected official vs seven here, was roughly the same in each town, just over $200K including expenses.

Here’s the difference, Qualicum pays its councillors $39K each year, while we pay ours about $17k. It’s not hard to make a case for higher salaries attracting a better quality of applicant. Pay closer to a living wage (which is $53k a year in Victoria, it would be a little less here) and you’ll get more qualified people, and more bang for your buck. And, as the Qualicum model shows us, on a per-capita basis, it doesn’t have to cost residents more money.

In fact, its arguable that paying lower salaries does not equal lower staffing costs for the Town; Ladysmith’s members of Council submitted the five highest expense accounts of all Town staff last year. One Councillor raised their annual salary by 71% by submitting $12k in expense claims, double the average claim submitted by Qualicum councillors.

One of the promises of our ‘award-winning’ Official Community Plan (OCP) is to “continue to enhance Council’s performance by conducting annual ‘self-assessments’. Independent assessments would be more meaningful, but it still sounds like a good idea. Considering a smaller Council who are paid higher wages would be a better idea.

Raises For Council

Too often town councils, ours included, have a habit of giving themselves a raise as one of the first items of business after they are elected. It is a trend with really poor optics. It’s not like we don’t know what the job pays before we decide to run for office.

Here’s an idea, even if it’s not new. Votes for pay rises should be one of the last acts of Council members before the end of their terms. That way they would be voting for a raise for the position of councillor or mayor, not for themselves. The electorate then gets to say who gets the raise. And the position’s pay stays in line with the cost of living

Building a business tax base is by far the most efficient way to grow the Town’s revenue. Residential properties (known as Class 1) generate $2.21 per $1,000 of assessed value; Business properties (Class 6) generate $7.51 per $1,000. They are 3.4x more effective at raising revenue for the town, yet our strategy for the past decade and beyond has been almost exclusively focused on expanding the number of residential units.

Part of that strategy has been driven by the need for housing, and that demand is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. But we simply cannot continue to expect homeowners to shoulder the full burden of our growth ambitions and escalating costs.

The Town’s OCP calls for the ‘intensification’ of the downtown core, the ‘infill areas’ and ‘the creation of ‘10-minute neighbourhoods’, satellite communities within town boundaries that will add convenience for residents while simultaneously lowering our collective carbon footprint. Again, more good ideas, if well managed, and which would require us to attract and integrate small businesses to each micro-community.

But the path we are on at present – courting enterprises such as the Dollar Store and Starbucks – is not conducive to building communities – satellite or otherwise -- or mutually supportive business clusters that benefit from each other’s foot traffic.

The business models of multinational retailers such as those listed above and others are designed to ‘beggar’ the competition until they are the only ones left standing. Yes, they often donate to local charities. But at what cost to the wider community and to community health?

We owe our kids more than the promise that if they work hard and graduate from high school, they can look forward to a job working for minimum wage at McDonalds, A&W or KFC. We, as a community, owe them better entry into the working world than that.

Green economy

I would support forming taskforces to identify which promising retail sectors we should try to attract to town. The aim is to create clusters that will benefit from attracting consumers with similar interests. My sense is that the Green economy might hold promise for us, business retailers selling micro-systems and components for solar, wind energy, water-catchment services, energy efficiency and sustainable/smart homes.

It would also help residents to deliver some of the goals in our OCP, where ‘green’ (in the environmental sense) is presently mentioned more than 30 times, without any defined projects or deliverables.

Being the first in this region to establish those forward-looking business clusters will establish Ladysmith as a Town with vision, making it an attractive place to live and visit.

Leveraging The Waterfront

As a seaside destination, there will be opportunities to build business clusters for recreational water sports. Creating a business hub for quality retailers of water-sports equipment and repair – canoeing, kayaking, sailing, water skiing and the like – would attract consumers, encourage visitors to schedule stops in Ladysmith and compel them to get off their boats when they visit here.

Which sectors we prioritise and how we attract them is for the taskforces to decide. But one thing is for certain, we need to have vision. We need to target new economies, not old ones. And whatever we offer needs to be unique to our town. We need to have the courage and imagination to be different.

The OCP in its present form has some very good ideas. But until they are attached to deliverables, budgets and implementation deadlines, that’s all they are, ideas; ideas that were generated by a small circle of people who were not fully representative of the residents who will have to pay for the projects.

All the Town literature you will read – and all of the public commentary from Council -- insists that the OCP was forged from public consultation. It was not. The plan was crafted from a series of invite-only ‘charettes’, private meetings. The plan was then approved at Council; and after you were invited to voice your concerns.

None of those concerns was addressed in the OCP because it already had been written and approved, but that is what passes as public consultation here. Clearly, for that reason, we will have to revisit each section of the OCP. It is undeliverable in its published form, especially on the waterfront, which is the Town’s most valuable asset.

Time For An OCP Reload

I know this is going to upset some folks who are fed up with the decades of false starts and false promises about developing our waterfront. But there is a reason why every administration has failed to deliver their ‘plans’: they all have lacked the kind of mandate that comes from public consensus. Politicians come and go; Councils come and go; Administrators come and go; residents and their financial support are the only constant. Without full public participation from the concept stage, there is no enduring public mandate, only a plan.

We need to revisit the present set of goals within the OCP and view them from the position of what will be achievable, affordable and most beneficial to the Town across three time horizons: two years, five years and the next generation.

Participants in the review will need to be selected from a broad cross-section of residents and business owners – indigenous and non-indigenous. They will have to illustrate their dedication to putting collective interest over personal. Then we will appoint a Steering Committee whose members reflect those broad characteristics and have the skills to ensure the goals are delivered.

As the plans become deliverables, any contracted business partners we chose to develop or consult will, at a minimum, need to adhere to the basic rules for transparency and fiscal accountability that are mandated for all corporations under the BCBCA, including audited annual reporting of revenues, profits, executive salaries and bonuses. For the bigger projects, audits may be necessary to prove our partners’ good standing.

And I hope Councillors have no illusions that their approval of the OCP comes with public consent to bill the taxpayer for every project within it. Because every goal in the OCP remains aspirational, a budget for each will need to be approved before any ground is broken.

Let’s face it, our Town’s public-consultation process for the past decade (and probably longer) has been a shambles and far from best practice. Rather than an opportunity to sell the merits of a new project or initiative, Council and their Administrators see it as a process to be avoided.

But, as discussed earlier, initiatives lack legitimacy and staying power without a public mandate, so we need to establish minimum standards for best-practice public consultation. For one, the latest information on the development or business should be on the table when projects are brought to the public. We have simply seen too many projects completely change, once approved. It makes a mockery of the process.

Developers should present mature plans; no more submitting straw plans that are solely created to gain public acceptance and then changed once the project is approved. Any developer that is reluctant to meet that minimum requirement shouldn’t build here. And Council ensure it is met.

I don’t blame the developers for this; they are simply doing what the Town allows. But, if all plans are on the table, the public can ask the kind of questions that support sustainable community development. Questions like: in what ways does the project meet the sustainability goals set in the OCP? What are the anticipated impacts on safety, traffic flow or quality of life in the existing neighbourhood? Who’s paying?

Meeting Best-Practice

Aside from the project details, the Town needs to ensure that the process tries to meet the best practice standard for public consultation: to consult, accommo¬da¬te, collaborate and seek consent, when the environment or quality-of-life issues are at risk. These conditions were enshrined by the province during the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain saga. And the duty to consult has been clearly laid out by the Supreme Court of Canada in case after case.

The standards were designed negotiations with indigenous folks, but there is no reason they can’t be applied for non-indigenous use.

No one asking for adherence to best practice is asking for anything they’re not entitled to. In a beautiful town such as Ladysmith, tightening this process will not create a shortage of developers. Developing in Ladysmith is an attractive proposition. We would be asking for simple professionalism. And, as our elected representatives, Council has a duty to ensure that.

It is sad that the management of our cities and towns has devolved to include an Alternative Approval Process (AAP) that makes it very hard for us to stop the folks we elect from spending our money without talking to us first. The AAP is little more than an ‘alternative’ to public consultation for large taxpayer-funded expenditures that require consent.

Its proponents will tell you it’s an efficient way to rubber-stamp projects. It’s not. It simply allows elected officials to spend large sums of public money without having to face the people who provide it.

Last year, dedicated folks in Ladysmith marshalled triple the number of signatures (more than 2,100) that this Town required to reject the AAP for a $13.5m new City Hall. As one of people who spent days on the street getting the required signatures, I know most folks didn’t object to funding a new city hall, they objected to a process that avoided full disclosure and public consultation for the most expensive project in Ladysmith’s history.

From Bad To Worse

Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come. There is political appetite to completely bypass the AAP process, which has become too much of a hurdle for some development-crazy Councils.

In the next few months, you will hear people reasoning that consent for the projects they are proposing is given at the ballot box each election. In other words, once you elect them, they can do what they want. Others will tell you they will only need to bypass the AAP for ‘essential infrastructure’, in other words, the expensive stuff.

Don’t buy any of it. There is no substitute for a public-consultation process that requires consent.

This year, Council will be sending healthy delegations to the annual gatherings of both the Union of BC Municipalities and the Association of Vancouver Island Coastal Communities. When I’m elected Mayor, I will join these delegations an encourage our Councillors to vote against bypassing the AAP. I will disclose those who don’t.

And when we return, I will encourage our Council never to hide behind the AAP process again for town business.

The Town’s administration dictates what discussions are held en camera; traditionally, Council has taken the position that the Administration knows best, so they defer to the CAO’s decision. This means we have a situation where unelected officials say what you get to know, which is unhealthy. The folks we elect should have the courage and intelligence to make those decisions, so they are accountable to us.

In Ladysmith, it is very, very rare for a Council meeting not to be preceded by an en camera meeting of up to 90 minutes. Viewed with an annual lens, that is a roughly a working week of Town-related discussion that is being kept from the public each year.

I’m told by councillors in our closest constituency, North Cowichan, that roughly half of their meetings are preceded by en camera discussions, which means they do roughly half as much town business behind closed doors. Their population is more than triple Ladysmith’s and their business dealings would presumably reflect that. Yet they manage to get triple the volume of sensitive business done in half the time. Or maybe they just have a stronger culture of transparency.

The list of rules for what issues can and should be held en camera are very clear, and not very long. There are bound to be some grey areas, but an elected Council should always err on the side of transparency, not secrecy.

Who Says What We Are Allowed to Know?

Right now, senior town administrators set the agenda for our bi-weekly Council meetings and which issues should be held En Camera, or out of the view of the public. In other words, an unelected official gets to say what you get to know.

Council mostly defers to the admin’s advice; very rarely are those decisions debated. That has to change. The rules for what qualifies to be discussed en camera are pretty clear and pretty simple. In cases where it is not clear, we should be erring on the side of transparency, not secrecy. When you elect us, you provide Council, not the Administration, with the mandate and responsibility to make those decisions.

The town’s administrators also get to filter which letters and emails from the electorate your Council members receive. In other words, an unelected official gets to say whether your concerns are worthy of your elected representative’s time.

A few years back, we sent by email a petition with 1,000 of your signatures to Council before they voted to change the zoning for the Slag Point area from Waterfront Park to Low-Density Residential. That petition asked for the matter to be sent to referendum in the general election, so folks could have a say. Council was prevented from seeing that petition before they voted.

While I have no sense of whether that intervention was welcomed by the Council at the time, some of whom are still in office, I would just say any Councillor who’s reluctant to read letters from their constituents shouldn’t run for public office.

The town’s Our Green Initiatives page suggests our main active sustainability initiatives are door-side recycling, compost, a public garden and a $75 rebate for hooking up a barrel to capture rainwater.

In 2014, we changed our bylaws to include ‘alternative energy devices’, but we put restrictions on what you build and how you build, and that change doesn’t appear to have been enough to gain traction with homeowners and developers.

We will need to be a lot more committed to energy efficiency, environmental stewardship and sustainable development before we can claim ‘sustainability is a way of life’ in Ladysmith, as we do on the Town’s website. Saying it doesn’t make it so.

At a very high level, the accepted global framework for sustainability is the U.N.’s 17 related development goals. In SDG 11, there are ideas for making towns more resilient, highlighting the need for inclusive and sustainable urbanisation, access to green and public spaces; SDG 7 has ideas for a transition to clean and affordable sources of energy.

In North America, the Strong Towns initiative has very good, achievable ideas. Each initiative has many goals, not all are suitable or achievable for Ladysmith; the idea is to discuss which goals are important, achievable and practical for us, and then create a pathway to get there.

Think globally, act locally

For example, part of North Cowichan’s drive to ensure sustainable development involves new policies to assure that no new high-density residential properties can be built with carbon-based fossil fuels as their primary heat source; on a smaller level, our closest neighbours to the south are also following Fortis’s lead by offering a $1,000 subsidy to any home or business looking to replace their carbon-based heating systems with cleaner electric or gas heat pumps. A small but important step.

I’m not aware of similar initiatives and incentives being offered by our Town, and I’m wondering why. It is big journey to sustainability, one that necessarily starts with small steps. We have some very small ones in place, but we need to be more ambitious.

Policy 8.10 in the OCP commits us to “establish and promote incentive programs to support decarbonisation, and energy and water efficiency in existing buildings”.

‘When’ is the question that comes to mind.

Despite what some members of Council will tell you, this town has a parking problem; even when I moved here 12 years ago and 30% of the shopfronts were vacant, we had a parking problem. And as we comply with the goals of the provincially mandated Bill 44 – creating higher density residential areas to fulfill the need for more housing – we are going to have an even bigger parking problem.

The answer is not, as suggested, to conduct an amateur drone survey to justify adding another body to the town payroll in the form of a parking-enforcement officer. We don’t have a compliance problem; we have a parking problem. There are just not enough parking slots to meet demand in the downtown core. Adding to the tax burden for residents isn’t going to resolve that.

What will resolve it, eventually, is ensuring that all new developments – even renovations that add population density to existing areas – come with a surplus parking solution. That will add costs for developers and folks that want to add second properties to their residential or commercial lots. But that is the price we now have to pay for poor planning and infrastructure upkeep. We simply cannot keep approving parking-deficit projects like the Bayview Pub, Dalby’s and the Traveller and hope that someday the parking problem will sort itself out.

In the interim, we need to identify a spot very near the downtown core that can be used for parking overflow during the peak periods. The town-owned lot behind the museum comes to mind.