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Welcome to the Cheer.fm podcast, Ask Salt Spring Answered. After many Ask Salt Spring events,
we sit down in our studio with Gail Baker's guest and review some of the key points discussed. Hi and welcome to episode nine of Ask
Salt Spring Answered. Damien Inwood sits down with the LCC candidate Earl Rook. Okay I'm here with
Earl Rook who is a candidate in the LCC upcoming elections and we've just sat through a two-hour All Candidates meeting hosted by Ask Salt Spring.
So, Earl, welcome to Cheer.fm, and perhaps you can tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Well, thank you for having me on.
I come to running in this position after 25 years of government work, primarily in finance and administration. So my background is budgeting and accounting, project management,
facilities management, policy development.
And so when the LCC was established, I felt that it was a really good fit for my background,
something where I could make a contribution with the skills and knowledge that I already had
and a way to give back to the community.
Okay, and I think at today's session, anyway, the candidates were asked
what would be your most interesting section of the LCC's mandate
that you would be responsible for, and I think you said at that time
economic development.
Yes, indeed.
Of the four commissions that are being discontinued or have been discontinued, I think my interests are most strongly in the area of economic development, sustainable economic development. important, relying not simply on tourism with its seasonal ups and downs or with agriculture,
but a diverse, truly diverse economy where we can have good paying jobs for people in a green and
sustainable way on our island. And that's an area well within the purview of the LCC. And that's an
area I'd like to work on. Okay, can you give us some examples of that? Obviously, we know that during the tourist season,
the population triples or whatever,
and thousands of people come here.
And, of course, we all know about the farmers here
and the food process, like farm-to-table kind of thing,
and also eat local and all that kind of stuff.
What else would that be involving?
Okay, so other elements of a diversified economy for Salt Spring,
specifically beyond food production and tourism, would include the arts.
We've been known as an arts community for a very long time.
We have some real challenges there, particularly with aging out of our artist population.
We're having a hard time attracting
younger artists, especially those that require studio space, because space is at a premium here.
And then just for other businesses that either want to establish here or that we might choose
to attract here, we have a real problem with available commercial and light industrial space
where they can actually set up shop.
And so we've seen the whole story with Salt Street Spring Coffee,
the struggles Francis Bread had just to continue functioning as a business on the island.
While the LCC doesn't really have zoning authority, that's something that lies with the trust, I think it's an important priority for economic development to ensure that we have as many opportunities as possible
and we break down the barriers where we can to clean local businesses making a
go of it here and not being forced off island because there's simply nowhere to
do their work. So would you be in favor say of setting up a development where
artists lofts were available or something like that? Well there's
certainly been talk about that doing an art center a cultural center somewhere
in in the Ganges area and while that's not strictly something that the LCC
would itself initiate I think community groups that came together
could give us some really good proposals
for leveraging space resources
where we could actually get a more thriving
and vibrant arts economy going,
especially in the downtown core.
Now, liquid waste seems to be top of mind
for lots of people at the moment.
It's not a very sexy topic, but everybody obviously thinks that there's ways of saving some of the $600,000 that we pay every year to ship our liquid waste off Salt Spring.
What's your view on that as an economist type of problem, I guess, that we'd have to address.
Well, a couple of things about our liquid waste situation.
Yes, we're currently spending $600,000 a year to truck it off island.
As I understand that that was no one's choice or preferred solution.
But after running into one roadblock after another, that was by default what ended up happening,
and I don't think anyone's happy with it.
I think it ends up being very prominently featured because it's one of our high expenses that's very visible,
and we don't really understand all of the budgetary intricacies of the CRD program deliveries on the island, but that particular
liquid waste issue stands out because of the high expense, the high visibility, and the fact that
there's really no strong support for the status quo. We were all forced into it, and I think we
want to make that one of our many priorities going forward, but we need to recognize that simply saying
we're not going to truck it off island anymore
doesn't immediately save us the money or resolve the problem.
The solutions that were rejected in the past,
some of which had a lot of merit, in my opinion,
need to be revisited.
And even if we implement them, we will not save the entire amount, but we'll certainly
have a more rational approach and a more environmentally conscious approach, I think,
to handling our liquid waste than simply putting it on trucks and sending it off on a ferry.
Right. And I gather from previous discussions that I've sat in on, some of it is to do with
CRD regulations that doesn't allow certain ways of handling this particular product.
Anyway, I have a note here in my book that at some point you were talking about changing density on Salt Spring.
That's always a hot-button issue. Tell me a bit about that.
Yes, it's a hot-button issue.
But when we're speaking about our housing problem, and particularly our housing problem for working people, so we're talking affordable housing,
we have a situation on Salt Spring that's evolved over generations with large lots, big houses, everything well separated.
And so we have a lot of housing on Salt Spring but the mix is really off
from what we need on Salt Spring right now and the kind of housing we need is most economically
and environmentally built established with high density. I think there are countless studies
environmental science where if you're going to have a limited impact,
you're going to have a more limited impact if you have high-density housing adjacent to green space
than taking that green space up and slicing it into big parcels with freestanding individual
homes. It's just not energy efficient. It's not efficient from a standpoint of infrastructure provision or transportation, and given the situation we have with Ganges, it would
make a whole lot more sense to have high density but low-rise, small footprint
facilities so they wouldn't be obtrusive or dominate the landscape in any way and
yet would provide a fair amount of affordable housing
for a lot of people who need to work in the area, putting on transit lines.
We still have our basic infrastructure problem, which is water.
But if you do have higher density housing, it's much easier to provide water and sewage
and all of the other infrastructure needs than if you have distributed
scattered housing across the island. Okay, thanks very much for coming in, Earl. And yeah, you're
listening to Cheer.fm and my name is Damian Inwood coming to you from our studio in Ganges. Thank you.