Shadrack Elected President of Regional Municipal Association
By Bill Metcalfe
Andy Shadrack was recently named President of the Association of Kootenay Boundary Local Governments (AKBLG). He is in his third term as the representative of Area D in the Regional District of Central Kootenay.
The AKBLG is composed of municipalities and electoral areas of southeastern British Columbia. It is a regional affiliate of the Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM)
The Nelson Daily conducted the following question and answer session with Andy Shadrack on June 5, 2012.
The Nelson Daily: Is there something in particular that you want to bring to the AKBLG this year, as its new president?
Andy Shadrack: I have been on the executive since 2008, I served as Vice President for two years, and we are slowly trying to develop discussions with our membership around issues of regional significance. We have helped create a committee to have a look at the Columbia River Treaty (coming up for renewal); in fact there is a meeting in Castlegar with the provincial government this week. That is the kind of initiative the AKBLG undertakes.
In the fall this year we are going to be looking at the issue of taxation. Obviously as a result of the recession the economy is a big issue. Environment is important as well, we have been engaging BC Hydro in discussions around the changes they are making to the Fish And Wildlife Compensation Program.
You say there are issues around taxation. What are those?
Over the last couple of decades there has been an awful lot of downloading going on from the federal and the provincial level, to local governments. It is getting to a point where property taxation is not enough for us to do all the things that other levels of government have asked us to do. In the 1990s when the Chretien Liberals were in power we persuaded them to give us a portion of the money they collected as gas tax. We use that for infrastructure around energy efficiency. And certainly I would like to see an engagement by UBCM with the province around them giving us a portion of the sales tax. Local governments are the only level of government that statutorily cannot run an operational deficit. We can only borrow money for capital expenditures.
Can you give examples of downloading?
Policing, emergency planning, dikes. To give you an idea of the absurdity, I have a colleague in the Creston Valley who has 45 kilometers of dikes, with a population of less than 2000. It is absurd for the government to think that a small rural population can take on responsibility for maintenance of dikes that will cost millions of dollars to maintain.
We are in ludicrous situations where the province creates regulations without consulting us and then expects us to implement them. I sit on a committee dealing with small water systems—that is a file I have been working for seventeen years, trying to make small water systems cost effective. The government has created a regulation and then expects us to implement an unworkable regulation. That is the sort of thing that the AKBLG tries to bring attention to.
A controversial situation I am dealing with right now is that the government has amended the Local Government Act to allow it to appoint a mayor and council to a newly created resort municipality. The Mayor of Invermere brought it to the AKBLG— he is on the executive. And I look at this not from the point of view of the issue of the resort but from basic principles.
You mentioned the Columbia River Treaty. It appears that none of the parties to the treaty wants to change anything and certainly not to cancel it, would you agree?
Yes.
So is it a non-issue then?
I will give you an example in my area. Below the Duncan Dam we get flooding directly caused by the way the dam is operated. There was flooding in the past but it was in the spring. But we sometimes get flooding in the July and August, which will wipe out hay crops and increase mosquitoes. I will raise this at the meeting. We need to do a review of those issues that are not being dealt with.
I understand that the dams are tied in to a much bigger system. There are times when the people in the Lardeau Valley will have to put up with some flooding in order to make sure Seattle or Portland doesn’t flood. But does that mean they should pay for that? That is the issue for me. That for me is the precise role of a local government politician, to bring the local issues forward into the provincial picture and say OK we understand you want to do this, but how are you going to compensate us for it?
Do you still get pigeonholed as a narrowly focussed environmental activist?
Oh yes, I do, I still lose votes at the Regional District 19 to 1, or 18 to 2. But that is what you have to do. I think it was in my second term when I observed that the board had been passing resolutions on climate change but not putting any money into the budget to actually do anything about it. I said, no, we are going to put $45,000 in the budget this year, and they said, no we are not, and I fought them right up to budget day on that issue and it raised a lot of hackles, but the next year we had a decent amount of money in the budget for it.
Is there any other favourite issue that you might want to bring to this new position of yours?
No, I came into local government because I wanted to make a difference in terms of the way people felt around government. And without wanting to blow my own horn, the third time I ran (for the Regional District) we got a 63% voter turnout, so I feel I must be doing something right, so I wanted to carry my ideas forward to a regional level.
What have you been doing right?
It is really important to report back to people regularly, to tell them how you are spending the money, how you are making decisions. It’s really important to make sure you don’t just hear the point of view of people who support you, but that you listen to other people to see what some of the ideas they have are, that can be incorporated into your decisions. So I think many people who don’t ideologically agree with me, respect me.
The other thing the various parties have got away from, I spend upwards of 2 months during election campaigns going door to door talking to people. They appreciate that, regardless of whether they are going to vote for me or not because it gives me a chance to hear what the issues are, how well we have done, what has to be dealt with. When I got elected, in my last ad I said, OK these are the issues you have asked me to work on. They realized I had listened to them on the doorstep.
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