To the Editor,
While it is nice to see new people jump into the electoral race, it’s not good enough. What we need is a slate of like minded candidates, working as a team, for the prosperity of Port Alberni.
Let’s face it the mayor and the council have been publicly squabbling like children and the city suffers: entrenched non-productive programs and subsidies remain. Assessments go up, taxes go up and all they can think of is to threaten to close our effective, efficient and greatly needed fire department.
Look around: with just a little more effort, the business development office can have all of downtown Third Avenue closed and abandoned.
Where there is a real opportunity is in senior retirement and the service industry it requires, we have the cheapest property and one of the best climates for it in B.C.
It would need enthusiastic effort. The city would need to build first-class medical clinics and offer them to doctors at little or no cost, plus housing, to get doctors here.
We could take some of the old, burn scarred buildings in the downtown, offer them to developers for the taxes in return for new buildings, with commercial at ground level and condos above.
Let’s sell our valley to the world, not as a smelly mill town, full of unemployed. But as a human and natural resource rich Paradise Lost, waiting to welcome them.
Frank Hands,
Port Alberni