According to the city newsletter: Penticton is a vibrant, innovative, adventurous waterfront city focused on sustainability, community and economic opportunity.
Wonderful vision statement. Now I know why council needs a communications director. Vibrant: Active with daytime activities by a growing segment of the population dedicated to preserving parkland from commercial intrusion assisted by an active native population intent on retaining their heritage.
Innovative: Commercializing parkland is the best innovation since sliced bread.
Adventurous: Lives on the cutting edge; refusing referendums; ignoring native rights and essential environmental studies protecting myriad wildlife in area, despite warnings from a former Minister of Indian Affairs, Tom Siddon.
Waterfront: Sees waterfront as a business opportunity to give deadbeats with no financial backing a leg up to pursue pie-in-the-sky, get rich quick schemes.
Focused: Council is quickly compounding the idiocy of their claims of a ‘mandate for change’. Senior staff inadequacies are hampering the ability of council to govern.
Sustainability: Council certainly sustains. Council would rather spend $60,000 to $100,000 on a lawsuit, than $30,000 on a referendum. How long will council continue squandering staff time due to major blunders caused by unqualified hiring practices? Why are taxpayers’ being forced into subsidizing and/or extending time limits on poorly researched projects? Great staying power council!
Community: Successfully divided the community against itself. We are no longer a community that works together and plays together. To make up for the shortcomings of senior staff, mayor and council, we petition; protest; picket and research together instead.
Economic opportunity: Hotel on parkland and other commercial projects initiated during the terms of former CAO Annette Antoniak and Colleen Pennington; the current EDO, show a blatant disregard for the history of our community. This travesty is combined with ignorance of basic requirements to research covenant, environmental or native rights issues and is accentuated by the senior staff and council’s disastrously stunted vision for this city.
It is time for this council and Trio to cut and run on the lease portion of the contract. Council should do a thorough review of their former and present hiring practises and take immediate remedial action on the senior staff incompetence, which is an embarrassment to the city and residents. Trio, the mayor and council with the assistance of these highly-paid (for their expertise) senior staff have divided this town long enough. Back down; make the necessary employee changes or resign.
Elvena Slump, Penticton