SRD sent four representatives to Cortes island by water taxi on June 6th to conduct a community consultation meeting on two tax service referenda: the long-delayed and controversial hall tax, and the first-responders training tax. Present at the meeting from SRD were: Chair Michele Babchuk, CAO David Leitch, Tom Yates (Senior Manager), and Aniko Nelson [Parks and Planning Manager]. Present at the meeting from Cortes were approximately 80 community members.
With Cortes Island’s largest annual event fast approaching, I met with event organizer Kristen Schofield-Sweet. As it was a glorious spring afternoon., we sat at the wooden picnic table behind the radio station. When Howie Roman finished his program, “Anything Goes,” he joined us in a discussion of Seafest 2019 and what this event means to our island community.
In the segment of the March 13, 2019, Strathcona Regional District board meeting devoted to correspondence, Campbell River Mayor Andy Adams asked staff for clarification about a phrase used by one of Cortes Island’s better known anti-hall tax advocates. She described the proposed hall tax as using “public funds for private organizations.” It is good to see this kind of communication in the public record, where inaccuracies can be dealt with. The answers he received were adequate, but one of the island’s two hall managers was actually sitting in the spectator section directly behind Mayor Adams. Had he been given the opportunity to speak, this is how Howie Roman would have responded to the question, ” is Gorge Hall a private club?”
During all the fire and fury over Cortes’ proposed “Hall Tax,” it occurred to me that the problem of increasing difficulty in operating and maintaining our Community Halls can hardly be unique to Cortes. Surely other communities are facing similar challenges; it would be worth finding out how (or whether) they were solving the problem. So I set out to investigate the funding basis of as many coastal community halls as possible, in communities not too different from our own: smallish, rural-ish, remote-ish.
