Moccasin Flats, bear safety, and more: City Council recap

The City is currently in phase one of a four phase plan to improve city safety and social health. Phase one “seeks to build capacity and address hazards,” and phase two will see the City “intend to demonstrate appropriate capacity to the Supreme Court to transition the entrenched LPBE to other forms of shelter.” If the Supreme Court approves, the City could move forward with plans to remove the encampment.

“It’s an eyesore, it’s a health and safety hazard, there’s fire hazards. There’s been several shootings there over the years. There have been a number of things, so really the encampment has turned into this lawless area where people can come and go and do what they want,” Councillor Brian Skakun said when discussing why he believes the encampment needs to be removed.

More details on this topic will come later this week in another article.

Snow Removal

City administration presented data showing money could be saved from the City’s budget, should it choose to cut snow removal services like ceasing to clear residential driveways, increasing snow event thresholds, and reduction of services on statutory holidays. While the savings would be around $1.275 million, Council was strongly opposed to the idea of cutting snow removal services. Among other reasons, several City Councillors brought up concerns from seniors who were worried about accessibility concerns. If snow removal services for driveways was lowered, how would seniors be able to leave their homes or clear their own driveways? Councillor Garth Frizzell notes that Prince George demographically is getting older, so maintaining services remains as important as ever.

The potential idea of cutting services on statutory holidays was also floated, but quickly shot down by Council. Beyond the already discussed topic of seniors, many Councillors add emergencies can occur at any point, regardless of holidays. If first responders needed to access a home but the roads were in an unsuitable condition, the lack of snow removal could potentially result in lives lost in the worst case scenario.

“(Cutting snow removal services) is playing with fire, in my opinion. And we got calls and emails the past several days that people are stressed out that they’re going to have to clear their driveways by themselves and the City won’t do it, and I said that’s absolutely unacceptable,” Skakun said.

Council added that in the grand scheme of things, the money saved wouldn’t be particularly significant anyways, so the detriment of less services far exceeded any potential gains that could be made.

Bear Awareness

The Advisory Committee on Bear Awareness presented eight referrals to council, offering suggestions and recommendations to the City on actions it could take to bear proof the community

These recommendations included but weren’t limited to things like:

Rolling out a pilot program for bear-proof or bear-resistant garbage cans.
An incentive program to manage/mitigate/remove fruit trees on private property.
Increasing education and awareness efforts.

All the Councillors agreed taking action to bear-proof Prince George is a great idea, and thanked the Committee for the work it did to present this research. However, the costs of implementing the actions are still not known, so Council voted in favour of supporting a referral. This means Council is moving forward in directing City Administration to present a cost analysis and more information on what exactly implementation would look like and the costs associated. Once this is known, City Council will review the information and make decisions then.

City Administration couldn’t say when more information will be available for Council’s consideration, but the review will begin tomorrow.

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by Tommy Osborne

Moccasin Flats, bear safety, and more: City Council recap

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