When city leaders fail to serve their residents, who’s there to call them on it? Their community newspaper, that’s who.
The sparring at the White Rock city council meeting last week over the installation of an accessibillity mat at the pier was one of the less impressive displays of leadership — or lack thereof — we’ve seen at city hall in recent days.
If you missed last week’s front-page story, the in-a-nutshell version is this: A majority of council members voted not to approve an outlay of up to $115,000 to install the aforementioned mat, which would make the uneven planked surface safer to traverse for those with mobility challenges. They opted instead to have staff look into grant opportunities, with an eye to putting the project into the city’s 2025 financial plan discussions.
In so doing, council members managed to point fingers at an advocate from the recently founded Equal Access Collective, suggesting it was somehow her job to have come up with grant money for them.
Never mind the fact that Susan Bains, the advocate in question, had in fact researched grant opportunities, only to learn that she, as a private citizen, couldn’t apply for funding for city projects.
She passed a list of grant opportunities on to city hall, where it evidently sat without further action — until councillors tried to call Bains out at a public meeting.
Let’s be clear: Making community amenities available to all citizens is a task that should not fall onto the shoulders of citizens — especially those citizens who are actively being excluded from participating in the full life of the city.
Ensuring that city amenities are accessible and available to everyone is the city’s responsibility. Full stop.
The fact that council chose to override the recommendation of its own accessibility advisory committee and delay the project was disappointing enough. The fact that it chose to do so while simultaneously blaming the people it’s supposed to be serving?
That’s a whole other level of epic municipal council fail.