Aliens land in Fort St. James

And citizens rate the city as "fine"

December 04, 2023

On Saturday night I went to the Brain Porter’s show at the Legion. Imagine a pyschedlic Tom Waits performing a northern B.C. War of the Worlds and that will get you part of the way there: Each song was set up by a snippet of a made-for-the-show radio drama in which a morning radio show from Prince George broadcast updates about a strange flash out west along Highway 16 which, it is slowly revealed, are aliens who do not come in peace. Here’s a bit I caught on my phone.

The whole thing was being filmed so I suggest you follow along on Instagram or YouTube if you want to be alerted when whatever version of this project comes out next.

The city is fine

City council’s finance committee meets today and one of their main agenda items is reviewing the results of the budget survey, in which members of the public are able to give their feedback on how they feel city money is being spent and how much value they are getting for their tax dollar in different areas. This is, of course, a self-selected group of people who are choosing to take part but one theme that I find interesting is that, overall, people seem to think things are basically fine.

For example, here’s how people felt about the amount of money being spent on fire services:

And here’s how people felt the fiir servicees are doing:

Likewise, here is snow and ice control:

And this is the same for basically every category — the most popular result for how taxes should be changed, or not, was “keep the same”, while satisfaction hovered between the 3 and 7 mark.

If I had to guess, I would hazard this is because most people only have strong opinions about one or two or maybe three items in the budget — they might really want more money for arts or parks or roads or really want to cut the police budget, and to they’ll make their strong feelings known on those cateogries while basically saying “it’s fine” to everything else. That can be seen, to a degree, in this chart which shows the areas that participants identified as being the most important — while police and fire lead, it’s only slight. Nothing really stands out.

Budgets are one of the most difficult topics to engage the community on. While people often have opinions on how much their property taxes are, they sometimes find it to be much more difficult to provide thoughtful feedback on each of the service areas. The sheer size and complexity of a municipal budget can be intimidating.

When we ask citizens their opinions on service areas within the municipal budget we also have to consider the context. If we ask the average citizen how important corporate services is to them, they may not hold it in high esteem, but they may also not understand what it is. Things like mandatory compliance with legislation, risk, and procurement are very important to the operation of a municipality but won’t rank as high as roads or parks in the everyday life of a citizen.

And remember — this is from the most engaged members of the city, the ones who both knew they could take part in a budget survey and took the time to do it. You would probably get even more ambiguity from the general public. Worth keeping in mind when you wonder why council isn’t more responsive to public opinion… much of public opinion is that things are maybe not great, but fine, basically.

It’s over but I just want to capture this delightful artwork from the symphony’s latest show:

Quick news:

Today’s song is from my favourite new artist, I played this EP three times in a row yesterday:

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