Derelict boats, road safety along the highway corridor and insufficient public transit in the region will likely be brought up by the board at the Cowichan Valley Regional District at the next meeting of the Union of BC Municipalities in September.
At a meeting on May 14, the board directed staff to to prepare draft resolutions on these issues that will be brought back to the table to be voted on before the UBCM meeting.
Cowichan Bay director Hilary Abbott said he wanted a resolution to go before the UBCM requesting senior level governments address the burgeoning challenge of derelict vessels washing ashore in the CVRD.
He said many small and large vessels have become environmental time bombs along the CVRD’s shorelines.
“It is timely, with four vessels currently on the mud flats and eel-grass beds of Cowichan Bay, that we advocate for support from our federal and provincial governments,” Abbott said.
“Many of the vessels in Cowichan Bay are low-income housing and the most vulnerable people don’t have the resources to upkeep the boats so they end up on the mud flats."
Abbott suggested that the robust procedures for dealing with derelict vessels in Washington State can be emulated here.
“In Washington, much of [the procedures] are dealing with vessels before they become derelict in a preventative manner,” he said.
“In that state, they are dealing with the demolition and destruction of the boats at the time of purchase.”
Duncan Mayor Michelle Staples pointed out that there have been a number of fatalities along the Trans-Canada Highway corridor in the past few months, and there are increasing safety issues there that are not being addressed.
She said the last time there was a significant corridor safety plan done by the Ministry of Transportation and Transit in partnership with the CVRD was in 2015, and it was just an updated plan from 2009.
“We really need to spend some time working with MOTT to develop something because the congestion is just going to keep getting worse because of the way things were built,” Staples said.
“We're literally waiting for a building to either have to be demolished or something to be able to make any kind of significant expansions to sidewalks and areas down by Boys Road and around the Super 8 Hotel and Allenby Road.”
Staples said she was in the area when a senior driving a scooter tipped over on the sidewalk because there wasn’t enough room to move around the telephone poles, and the woman fell onto the highway.
“If the light hadn’t been red, there was no way she could have escaped fatality, and this continues to not be addressed,” she said. “We need the province to work with us on this because [these safety concerns] will just continue to grow.”
Cowichan Lake South/Skutz Falls director Ian Morrison suggested a resolution to change the Ministry of Transportation and Transit’s scoring criteria for the allocation of new hours for transit, specifically for buses that travel to rural areas in the CVRD.
Jim Wakeham, the CVRD’s senior manager of facilities and transit management, told the board last month that the district has had no success with efforts to receive funding to expand bus services along some routes within the CVRD at this time.
He said many of the transit routes within the CVRD are scoring low on the criteria for expansions because they are mostly rural and their ridership is low.
Morrison said the CVRD is essentially shut out of additional transit hours for expansion in its rural areas.
He said the region took a hit from the COVID pandemic and it still hasn’t recovered.
“But we need to get people additional and better service," Morrison said.
"This is also a greenhouse gas issue. If we don’t make some noise on this and ask for changes to the criteria, I think we’re going to be structurally shut out of new service hours for the foreseeable future. I don’t see things changing if we keep getting scored on the basis of what we’ve been scored.”
