Thursday, March 9, 2023

"Moving the needle" on Resource Benefits Alliance ambitions


Prince Rupert Mayor Herb Pond provided for a short report on his recent visit to the provincial capital,  the trip part of a lobbying session for a number of Northwest leaders towards the ongoing work on their Resource Benefits Alliance work.

Speaking at the end of the Monday Council Session, Mr. Pond provided a positive review of his time inVictoria noting of a number of meetings and how he believes the Northwest representatives are making progress in their efforts, or 'moving the needle' as he put it.

"At our last meeting, I was doing what Councillor Forster is doing, I was participating virtually and that was because I was in position in Victoria for the visit of the co-chairs of the Regional Benefit Alliance, Resource Benefit Alliance, RBA.

We had a number of meetings down there. 

And for those that may not be aware of the RBA, the RBA, certainly this council is very familiar with it, started in 2014 a push to see some of the provincial revenues that are earned in the region returned to the region.

And there's some good models for this, the most recent one is up in the Peace Country, where you know Dawson Creek a community our size I think gets a cheque for 15 million dollars every year.

They're roughly our size and it just comes from the Provincial government out of the many sources of revenue that they get from the activity that happens in the region. 

Recognizing that a lot of it takes place outside of Municipal boundaries, there's no way for municipalities to capture it and yet the cost is borne the Municipalities of servicing those industries.

Following the short backgrounder on the RBA, Mr. Pond provided a snapshot of each of the presentations from the time at the Legislature.

"I think it's fair to say, well put it this way, people in the know said we moved the dial and so I take comfort in that.

The most substantial meeting was with the Premier and the Premier was very receptive to it, at that same meeting was Minister Cullen and Minster Kang. 

We had a separate meeting with  Minister Kang and her staff ... we met with Minster Osborne, we also took time to meet with the opposition caucus, the BC Liberals and the BC Green Party. 

Just to socialize the notion of this idea of returning some of the benefits that are accrued to Senior levels of government back into the local communities.


The Mayor also shared come of the themes that  each of the co chairs delivered their points to the province.

"The three co-chairs are myself, the Mayor of Terrace and the Mayor of Houston and we were all able to speak, I think strongly,  to the same issue but with very different expressions of the issue in our communities.

You know, Houston is in some cases  ripping up paved streets to replace them with gravel streets because they're cheaper to maintain, there budgets are so thin.

Terrace talked about having roughly 1.5 million dollars to do road replacement every year. Which buys in a good year about 400 metres of road replacement, that's complete road replacement, you know rebuild the whole thing. 

And at that rate of road replacement, it will  take them 212 years to get all the way around back to the original road that they started on. 

And last year, they were unable to even do 400 metres because of all the activity that is taking place in the Northwest, their contract bids were just out of sight, their 1.5 million dollars wasn't going to buy them anything, right.

And of course we were able to talk about water pipes and housing and the issues we have.

Each of us presented, I think it was a good travelling road show and I know  for sure from talking to others that we indeed moved the needle"

The Mayor's recap of his time in Victoria can be reviewed from the Council Video archive starting at the 37 minute mark.


Mr Pond's overview was one of more in depth looks at the latest progress for the initiative in recent times, you can explore some of the background to the initiative from our archive page here.

For more notes on the Monday Council session see our archive page here.

Cross posted from the North Coast Review.

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