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welcome to the cheer.fm podcast ask salt spring answered after many ass salt spring events we sit
down in our studio with gail baker's guests and review some of the key points discussed. Hi and welcome to episode 10 of Ask
Salt Spring Answered. Damian Inwood chats with LCC candidate David Courtney. Okay I'm here with
David Courtney who is a candidate for the local community council the LCC elections coming up on
May 27th and we've been in with the Ask Salt Spring group,
and I think there were 10 actually candidates there eventually, plus Gary Holman, and one of
them was yourself. So tell me, David, a little bit about your background. Thank you, Damien.
My background is I grew up in southern Ontario. Once I graduated from high school, I went to flying college,
and that begun my 42-year career with the nation's national airline. I'm currently retired,
semi-retired from the airline business, and I came to Vancouver in 1987 and subsequently to Salt Spring about 1999. We've been here, my wife Wendy, for about 24 years.
Okay, great. Now today we had discussed various issues and one of the ones that I found quite
interesting was you were talking about the immediate or as soon as possible implementation
of a 30 kilometer an hour speed limit throughout central Ganges. Why is that so important?
It's important for the protection, the public safety protection of our toddlers, of our seniors,
and our tourists who are not familiar with the downtry on traffic pattern. And I've been on this
for two years myself. We've had people, 300 people who petitioned and it was taken to the legislature
by Adam Wilson about three years ago. I've gone to everyone and no one has a problem
lowering the speed limit to 30 kilometers. If I'm elected, we're going to take Marlene Johnson
to the meeting with Minister Fleming on June the 2nd and say, come on, Minister Fleming,
this is something we want to do and get it done. The other issue is the speed limit from
Ganges to Fulford. I think we need to survey the community. And can we take that 80 kilometer
speed limit? Do we want to post it at 72 kilometers just to take a bit of the edge off
people? Because we have to have people
that observe the speed limits and that's the problem if you make the speed limit 30 kilometers
through town in the evening people will be traveling at 40 kilometers that's just life
that's how we do things right but uh i think we actually seriously have to look at the speed limit from Ganges to the Fulford Terminal. Okay.
And obviously highways is part of, or transportation is part of the LCC mandate, right?
Yes.
So you will be able to have an influence on that.
Obviously the meeting with Rob Fleming is right after the election.
Do you see it, how soon would you see it happening? You know, BC, Drive Safe BC has done all the studies with regards to if a pedestrian is hit at 50 kilometers,
or a pedestrian is hit at 30 kilometers, his chances or her chances of survivability are 90%
better at 30 kilometers. We have our construction vehicles and that sort
of thing some of the fellows 90 of the fellows observe uh 30 kilometers to begin with but we
have the odd fellow who's running on a tight schedule that does blow through town and it's
dangerous so we're going to get there how long is it going to take well let's uh if we're going to get there. How long is it going to take? Well, if we're going to advocate Mr. Fleming, Minister Fleming, and we're going to expedite it, we're going to get it done.
Okay, now another thing you talked about, and this has come up many times with regards to housing,
and obviously the shortage of increasing the housing stock was to do with water and although the LCC isn't responsible
directly for water at this point you are in favor of ending the moratorium for the
North Salt Spring Water District so that lots could be developed guess, for multi-use, I guess, multi-level housing.
Tell me a bit about that, the moratorium and ending it.
Okay, so it's not under the purview of the LCC,
but one of the unique parcels or correction pieces of the LCC,
we can advocate and we can encourage.
And what we do if we're elected and my three councillors or commissioners and myself
we've got two new uh trustees on the north salt spring waterworks uh district uh two very clever
people we go to them and there's a study being down done on the moratorium as we speak with
regards to lifting the moratorium um the other my other other facet is I'm just a newly minted trustee on the fire board.
The new fire hall doesn't have water.
The moratorium has to come off and allow the new fire hall to be serviced with water.
Otherwise, they have to basically fill up at Central, which is ridiculous.
So my feeling,
this is something we can resolve as a community because we have a crisis on the housing side of things. We got the fire department as well. We need to push this. We need to encourage
North Salt Spring Water District to lift the moratorium and do it in a proper fashion.
However they seem fit,
I think we've got two excellent candidates there at North Salt Spring, and I think we'll get it
done. It's a mandate that everybody wants done for the sake of housing, workforce housing.
Yeah, there is obviously a portion of the population who think that lifting the moratorium would result in rampant development and that kind of thing.
How would you sort of put their minds at ease on that question?
Well, you could put restrictions as far as workforce housing is probably going to be multifamily housing, right?
Norton Road project apparently is coming back up.
There's a prime example.
Norton Road could be workforce housing.
Bracket Springs, another one that's come on the market. These are things that are a really quick
fix right now. And it's workforce housing. It's not, you know, one acre lots with a 5,000 square
foot home. We're talking multifamily units that are going to be serviced to provide workforce housing.
Great. Thanks very much, David. This is Damian Inwood talking to you from our studio on Salt
Spring for cheer.fm, the voice of the Southern Gulf Islands. Thank you. Bye.