Sacha Peter

First of all, I got rid of the outdated mugshot on the upper-right hand side. When I put it there it was supposed to be a placeholder picture, but stayed up there much further than necessary. The same goes for the template.

There was a misconception that this site represented a public “forum”, and as a result if you wish to comment on any of the posts on this site, they can be emailed to me. I am interested in what you think.

I have also removed a post that was unnecessarily caustic to Rick Williamson and apologize for it. Please note that I am quite aware that anything that gets posted online is reproducible and saved for all eternity.

I am doing some studying on the research being performed on Cultus Lake. Part of this research involved data that was obtained from the 1920′s and 1930′s. The primary source of that data is from a paper titled Physical and Chemical Characteristics of Cultus Lake, British Columbia; it was published on June 29, 1937 and readers may find it interesting.

It can be downloaded by clicking here. Please note it is around 5 megabytes.

Many thanks to Lance Lilley for providing this.

Because of my vacation at the end of last year, I was sworn in on January 4, 2012 – the legislation requires elected people to take the oath of office within 45 days of the final declaration of election results – the deadline was January 6, 2012.

I notice that the FVRD has a draft copy of their Area E OCP update (everywhere except Cultus Lake Park) and you can get a copy of it from their website.

In August 2011, the park board did a media release, reporting a few numbers from our first half-year results. The link to the press release is here, although the salient detail is that we reported a surplus and our cash-on-hand for the middle of the year is higher than that of the same time in the previous year.

It is important to keep this information in perspective. Because mid-year is at the high end of the business cycle in Cultus Lake, by the end of December the “million dollar surplus” headline that other media outlets have tended to report will decline into a mid-6 digit number. The 2010 audited financial statements show a $447,000 net operating revenue (before capital expenditures), from about $850,000 in the first half of 2010. 2011 should track similarly.

This surplus is being accumulated and not spent nor reduced because it is financially prudent to keep reserves. This board (which took office in December 2008) inherited a serious financial problem and it has taken more than half of our term in office to turn operations around to the point where we can start accumulating cash and rebuilding our reserves. I will provide a chart to illustrate (you can click on it to zoom in):

The park board went from a mild surplus from 2003 to 2005 to consistent deficits from 2006 to 2009. Also observe that the 2007 deficit should have been much larger if you excluded the one-time revenue increase from the waterpark expansion deal. It was in 2009 when the present board put the brakes on non-critical expenditures while we tried to figure out how to stabilize the situation and reverse the financial damage. The 2009 budget was set and adopted by the outgoing board in November 2008, just as how the 2012 budget is going to be set by this present board (while the next board will have to deal with it). Fortunately for them, the next board will be facing a much better financial picture.

During 2006, 2007 and 2008, the park board effectively drained all of its cash balances and left the board in a very precarious situation in the bottom end of the cash cycle in 2009 – basically the park board had no cash left.

The 2010 budget was set in February and there was a series of fairly drastic decisions to increase revenues and decrease expenses. You can read about this history and the decisions I took that the board adopted on my February 12, 2010 post on the matter by clicking here.

2011 is shaping up to be a continuation of this financial recovery. We would be very well served by keeping our surpluses and accumulating cash until we have over a year’s worth of expenses in the bank account. Keeping this cash and not spending it is a form of insurance. It also offers the board much more financial flexibility in case if there is unexpected pressing need, especially with our aging infrastructure – earlier this year, for example, there needed to be some emergency repairs in the roof of a building which we lease out – this is in addition to the scheduled repair of the plaza roof which we budgeted for.

Future surpluses can also be used to help fix up the nuts and bolts of what local governments provide to people – mainly water, sewage, local roads and maintaining the park facilities which help to keep Cultus Lake the popular destination it is. This can’t be done without cash in the bank and a surplus financial position.

While it may not be the most exciting pronouncement or policy to do nothing with surpluses, it the most cautious and safest course of action for the park. Another way of thinking about it is that it can always be spent later – but when you spend it today, you cannot “unspend” it in future years without taking painful financial measures back in Feburary 2010.

Here is some relevant documentation on the Canada Geese portfolio. I have read these quite some time ago and am just posting them here for reference.

1. Frequently Asked Questions on Canada Geese

2. Handbook – Canada and Cackling Geese: Management and Population Control in Southern Canada (Canadian Wildlife Service – Environment Canada)

Comments: This is a fairly comprehensive guide on the options and tools available for landowners to deal with geese. It also describes the options that require a federal permit (per the Migratory Birds Convention Act) for action.

3. Management Plans (Canada Geese)

Comments: The requirements for obtaining a permit to cull geese is quite rigorous. Even then, the number of geese that can be culled will likely not be of a sufficient quantity to have a material impact as both demonstrated by the earlier year’s goose cull by the provincial government. It should also be noted that other areas of Canada have also been afflicted by massive goose populations, such as in Nackawic, New Brunswick (roughly 50km west of Fredericton) which actually managed to obtain a permit to cull 250 geese, but were unable to execute on it by virtue of failing to find somebody to actually execute the plan.

In addition, there was also intense local political pressure applied to prevent the cull. Indeed, in the previous year where I even suggested that we propose a motion to investigate the options of growing tall reeds or a limited cull of geese, we received quite a bit of correspondence, mostly from outside the region, pleading that we do not cull the geese. This was despite the fact that we have not even formally examined at the culling option.

Final comments: If there were easy solutions to the issue of swarms of Canada Geese blanketing any flat space with poop, they would have been found and implemented a long time ago by the myriad of jurisdictions across the country by now. Instead, we are left with options that are either expensive, impractical or ineffective. Discarding the impractical or ineffective options, our generic standby has been to have our staff use inverse leaf-blowers to suck up fecal matter from the beaches. This is labour intensive and can only be used in very limited areas of the park because of the large areas involved.

The final option, mainly “do nothing”, also has a certain appeal. In nature, exponential growth is always tempered by the carrying capacity of the environment. In the event of geese, it is a simple matter of mathematics that they cannot reproduce forever. History would suggest that some time in the future (impossible to predict, it could be next year, ten years from now) that there will be a significant fraction (>50%) of geese that will end up dying due to botulism and disease that spreads through a flock. An interesting reference of diseases that can affect geese flocks can be found here, although ironically the document is written in the context of preventing disease.

The risk of the do-nothing option is that the goose population will remain steady or increase. The origin of the entire Canada Goose issue is not the presence of the birds themselves, but rather the volume of poop they leave behind – there is a real concern that fecal matter will contaminate the waterside and when you see people swimming in the lake, it makes you wonder. It is not the most palatable act to walk through a grassy lawn stepping on the poop – just like how we don’t step on dog poop.

On August 9, 2011 I appeared as a delegation to the Fraser Valley Regional District Community and Regulatory Services Committee. The topic was to request resources from the FVRD to assist in updating the Park Use Plan.

The following speaking notes are not exactly what was spoken during the delegation but is a material summary.

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Speaking Notes – August 9, 2011 FVRD CARSC Committee Meeting
Prepared by Sacha Peter, Cultus Lake Park Board (CLPB) Chair

The issue:

Cultus Lake Park (CLP) requires FVRD assistance with the update of the CLP Park Use Plan (PUP) document.

Background:

The PUP was dated December 1997 and adopted on March 18, 1998.  The PUP, while not an OCP, details objectives and policies respecting land use issues, including service development standards, environmental protection, and recreation.

The plan was constructed with significant help provided by the FVRD.  CLP presently does not have the resources (financial or intellectual) to update this plan.

What the CLPB has done:

The CLPB has struck a Future Plan Advisory (Select) Committee that currently has 9 community members to discuss and recommend changes to the PUP which could be utilized by planners in their deliberations.

What the CLPB can do:

Assist with the extensive public consultation process and provide support for the process.  We also have a member of our staff, a building inspector (10 years experience in residential design and construction experience), that can provide technical support.

Why an update is needed:

Within the PUP states: “… the Board will review and update the Plan every five years.”  This has never occurred, short of three minor[1] amendments.

Some elements of the report are out of date with modern practice and no longer relevant in the 14 years since the report was written.

Finally, the FVRD OSP for Electoral Area ‘E’ states, “… there are no zoning or subdivision controls in Cultus Lake Park to reflect the land uses in place.”  It also states, “A two-step planning process, as provided for in the Official Regional Plan and the Official Settlement Plan for Electoral Area “E”, should be implemented, leading to the writing of zoning, regulatory and subdivision control bylaws for Cultus Lake Park in the manner provided for in the Municipal Act; and enacted by resolution of the Cultus Lake Park Board.”

 Why it would benefit the FVRD:

The FVRD and CLPB have discussed a possibility of a future joint planning process[2], while an April 1, 2010 memo (before the governance process formally was terminated) indicated that the CLP area will not be included in the OCP/OSP update process, presumably due to the lack of resolution on governance.

The governance process is finished and there will be no changes.  The provincial government has also indicated they will not change the Cultus Lake Park Act and thus we must assume the status quo will exist for the indefinite future.  CLP and FVRD will both benefit with harmonization of bylaws and policies.

Tighter coordination between the CLPB and FVRD will smooth out jurisdictional issues concerning developments going through CLP land (e.g. the most recent example being the sewage system connecting to the old marina site on East Cultus Lake).  It would resolve ambiguity concerning such proposals if they were planned for in advance.

It was noted in an FVRD memo[3] that “While within Electoral Area “E”, the Cultus Lake Park Board lands (CLPB) will be the focus of a separate planning project in the future and will not be included in the proposed OSP update. The CLPB lands are unique and bring a host of local issues which are best addressed through a separate process which is tailored to the community. The outcome of the CLPB planning process could be incorporated into the updated OSP in the future. The Regional Board may wish to consider budgeting for the CLPB planning needs in future FVRD Planning Department work priorities.” – That time is now.

Why now?

CLP has the largest residential jurisdiction (by population) of area ‘E’ and the OCP/OSP update will be incomplete without it.  The quicker it occurs, the less likely it will be that there will be adverse land usage decisions made.

To conclude, CLP is asking for:

The FVRD to commit to providing human resources toward re-writing the PUP in 2012.

I wrote a letter to the editor to the Chilliwack Progress and it was posted on Friday, July 15 online and also in the July 14th newspaper. This was in regards to a prior letter to the editor about Canada Geese droppings causing health hazards and being disgusting:

To the editor:

Re: Too many Cultus Lake geese (M. Dunbar, June 28)

I sympathize with M. Dunbar’s problem with the droppings left by Canada Geese. There are no single cost-effective measures that can be taken to solve this problem. Currently the Park Board’s staff is engaging in efforts to utilize machinery that removes fecal matter from the ground, with marginal effectiveness for the price paid. We have also received suggestions to put a short barrier at the lakeshore.

The most frequent question I am asked on this matter is “Why not shoot them all?”. The provincial government did perform a cull of geese earlier this year in the Cultus Lake area, but the numbers culled were insufficient to have a material impact. Current federal regulations (Migratory Birds Convention Act) make it very difficult to cull larger numbers.

Canada Geese droppings are not an issue unique to this area; indeed, municipalities around British Columbia have been forced to address this matter, especially in the Okanagan area where some beaches had to be closed because of the volume of geese feces. It is quickly becoming a health issue rather than an environmental one. It is a matter we are taking with increasing seriousness as the Canada Goose population is rapidly expanding.

Sacha Peter
Chilliwack, BC
Chairman, Cultus Lake Park Board

I did not have the space to get into the details of this matter in the letter, but staff have experimented with a machine that runs a light rake on the lawn and picks up the poop. Apparently the provincial park runs a machine that disperses the poop on the ground every morning. It is extremely labour-intensive to clean up goose poop and looking for an automated (machine) solution would be ideal. Unfortunately, these also come at a rather large price tag.

Installing tall reeds at the lakeshore would have a deterrent effect for the geese in the local area, but generally anywhere where they are not harassed they will spend time roosting in. This method may cease to be effective if the geese are not harassed at such locations. Half of the time when I go down Vedder Road, I always see Canada Geese at the strip of parkland south of Sardis Elementary. Sometimes you see the mother goose and their goslings cross the street to get to the small lake just west of Vedder Road. The City of Chilliwack installed a “waterfowl crossing” sign a couple years ago when apparently a goose got run over.

It goes without saying that Cultus Lake cannot afford a private army of people to chase geese off the lakeshore. It is too bad the geese can’t be trained to poop in a certain area!

My general worry is that it will take a specific reported incident of somebody experiencing a major heatlh issue directly as a result of goose poop that will allow this matter to be treated with a higher level of severity than it has historically.

Last week, the board made an announcement with regards to an organizational change in Cultus Lake Park. The press release is attached here.

Comments on the organizational change

There were many drivers for this change. One is that during the May 2009 strategic planning session, all 7 commissioners identified an update to the organization should be considered (page 11) to enhance organizational effectiveness. Another reason is that following the demise of the last governance process, it is crystal clear that Cultus Lake Park must be able to sustainably operate for the indefinite future – we cannot plan or depend on any provincial interventions with respect to the provision of park board services. Finally, the City of Chilliwack was provisioning building inspection services (for a fee), but they have indicated they will cease providing those services effective in the middle of this year. This update will bring this position in-house, and also the position will be able to provide commissioners with substantially better information to make decisions with respect to developmental variances, amongst other matters.

Currently, the services the park board provides can be lumped into three categories. A rough summary, and note this is not an exhaustive list, nor in any particular order:

1. Corporate – The local government (park board), financial administration, residential/commercial lease administration, bylaw/policy maintenance/enforcement, intergovernmental affairs, etc.
2. Community – Sewage, water, roads, grounds-keeping, park patrol/security, fire, parking, building/developmental, bylaw enforcement, etc.
3. Businesses – Sunnyside Campground, Vedder River Campground, Cabins by the Lake, Visitor Services.

The new organization should be more efficient by joining similar roles. For instance, at the beginning of 2009 the organization had three separate managers for Sunnyside, Vedder River and Cabins businesses. The new organization has a single manager to manage the three, which have similarities and currently use the same computer system to manage. This will also make provisioning of financial matters easier, as finance will deal with a single manager instead of three (e.g. think of processing purchasing orders).

There will be some staffing impacts. One of the most difficult parts of being in the role of a commissioner is when you have to make a decision that will negatively impact people’s jobs and livelihoods. All employees should be treated with respect, including those that are departing. While ending employment is never pleasant, the board has attempted to deal with this in a manner that is professional and respectful to those that are affected by this change.

The board is aware of financial savings with respect to this organizational change, but it is contingent on a number of variables. The number, even assuming the low end of the range is achieved, is not a trivial amount. Staffing costs constitute a majority of the expenses in Cultus Lake Park.

For many, change is a scary process. It is never easy to take new steps because stepping into the unknown is fraught with risks, both visible and hidden, that will emerge as you step forward. I believe the board made the right decision and while there will always be hiccups along the way during any organizational change, after implementation we will be able to provide excellent service to the public, including residential, commercial, and visiting people in the future.

Reaction to Media

Paul Henderson of the Chilliwack Times wrote an article on the change. I do not like the “win-win” headline since it does not show sympathy for those adversely affected by this update, but otherwise the story is accurate.

Tim Amey of MyChilliwackNews interviewed me and his summary report appears to have made assumptions that I did not mention, nor are really true. For example, I have no idea where he got the “sold a few lots” from (we have not), nor did I refer the employment loss as being “unfortunately that happens”. I recall just confirming there was a loss of employment. As I stated before in this post, decisions involving staffing changes are very difficult, and are given a very high degree of consideration before approved.

Currently, all locally elected officials (including park commissioners at Cultus Lake) are elected for three year terms.

At the Union of British Columbia Municipalities meeting, delegates voted 354 to 280 against extending the term length to four years.

I agree with this decision. Two years is too short (short term interests will dominate decision-making), four years is too long and three years is just right.

If you polled the 280 people that tried to implement four year terms, I would guess that most of them, in private, would say that they dislike campaigning and don’t want to be judged by the electorate as frequently simply for the reason that they might lose.

The public excuse for four year terms is that most other jurisdictions in Canada have four year terms. This is irrelevant.

Another reason given is “voter fatigue”. I completely disagree with voter fatigue as a reason – if people are not interested enough to vote in an election which affects them, that in itself is a vote. One would think that voting every three years is not much of a burden, but you could easily extend the logic of “voter fatigue” as an excuse to not have elections at all, and just elect local officials for their life.

Elections are a fact of life in Canada, and you get opportunities to vote in Federal, Provincial and Municipal levels. Once in a blue moon, you even get to vote on things like citizens’ initiatives, such as on the HST, or referendums, such as on the Charlottetown Accord. It is a choice to spend the 5 or 10 minutes it takes to get to the local polling station and vote. Some do, some don’t; it is ultimately the decision of eligible voters to make. I do not see low voter turnout to represent any sort of “erosion” of democracy at all. In fact, low turnout enfranchises the people that do show up to vote.

Three year terms is an ideal length of time – newly elected people will have enough time to get to speed and work on a legislative agenda, and the public has sufficient time to judge the performance of elected officials in office.

Other jurisdictions than Cultus Lake have been having issues with all sorts of wildlife – more than just Canada Geese. This includes deer, rabbits, and so forth.

The following two links are from the Vancouver Sun, and are very similar articles.

Link 1: Municipalities want province to help get rid of deer, geese and other pests
Link 2: Geese, deer running wild in B.C. municipalities; province asked to help