A note on not paying me money

This is a ridiculously packed newsletter. Yesterday, I got a notification about someone willing to pledge money for this thing if I ever turned on payments, and I’ve had some other people ask about pitching in a few bucks here and there. While I really appreciate it, I’m only able to do this because I’m writing about local reporting and the work done by reporters. So if you would like to financially support local news I would ask you to consider putting the money you’d be willing to spend on this and distribute it some of the outlets I frequently link to, where you’re able to. Thanks!

There is some major city council drama coming up but let’s talk about the other news, first.

5 Prince George Mounties charged in death of Indigenous man

In 2020, I reported on a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Prince George attended by hundreds of people and led jointly by members of the city’s Black and Indigenous communities. The focus was on the police treatment of both Black and Indigenous people and along with the internationally known name of George Floyd, there were also signs bearing the name of Dale Culver and Everett Patrick, Indigenous men who died in police custody in the city — Culver in 2017, Patrick in 2020. Culver’s daughter, who was 14 when he died, spoke. From my reporting at the time:

That was two-and-a-half years ago and, as of yesterday, the RCMP say those police are still on active duty (though not if they are in Prince George).

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math: Between these five and another case in 2016 that saw three officers charged (with one ultimately going to trial) and a police force of about 120, there is a roughly 1 in 20 chance that if you interacted with a cop in this city circa 2017 they would be charged with a crime within five years (noting that so far, none have been convicted).

You can add to that the fact the Independent Investigations Office has also recommended charges against police in the death of Everett Patrick, but as of now the prosecution service has not issued a decision on if they will be pursued.

Hiring First Student to provide school buses continues to go just great

Quick summary: For years, the school district paid a company called Diversified to provide school buses. At the beginning of the fall 2022 semester, they switched to a company called Student First. Pretty much immediately, kids stopped reliably being picked up. This lasted for months, to the point the district actually started providing some parents with vouchers to pay for alternate forms of transit. Then they ‘solved’ the problem by hiring Diversified to handle every route that for whatever reason Student First wasn’t able to, while continuing to pay Student First to do the job they were supposed to do in the first place, but with the added bonus of paying another company to do the rest of that job. Anyways, it continues to go just great.

Snow watch

Things are supposed to taper off today but as of the morning a winter storm warning remains in effect…

Stay home if you can.

Rat watch

OK, I was kind of joking yesterday but I’m legitimately starting to worry about the number of domestic rats people are finding. There was a third post yesterday, this one in a different area and I’m pretty sure it’s not the same one since the first two were successfully captured and being taken care of by people. Sadly, there is now someone worried that the rats they had to rehome may have all been released and she’s trying to track them down and basically if you come across any friendly rats, please give them somewhere warm to go and put the word out in one of the Prince George pet groups, because there are people trying to look after them.

News briefs

• More reporting on the school board vs union here and here. At the Citizen, Neil Godbout says the union is out of line.

• Indigenous groups gather at Moccasin Flats homeless camp for healing fire. Indigenous people are overrepresented in the justice system, homeless camp and toxic drug poisoning deaths.

• RCMP investigating after a drone crashed into someone’s home.

• Kiwanis AleFest raises $60,000 for charity.

• CBC reporter saved lives, court hears.

Resource roundup

• The costs of the Coastal GasLink pipeline construction keep rising.

• MP Taylor Bachrach wants federal government support for laid-off mill workers.

An emotional budget in which the city finally pays the piper

Here’s the situation: Last year, council wanted to find out why we spend so much money on cops, so they commissioned a report to look into it. The report came back and said, actually, based on the level of crime in the city you need to spend an extra $5 million on cops over the next five years. Guess what the city doesn’t have? An extra $5 million. Read all about that here:

So last night, the question was do we put an extra $1 million into the budget to start hiring more cops? And if so, where does that money come from? Well, guess what? The city happens to a couple million in cash sitting around in Safe Restart Funds, which is money given to the city by the province to deal with costs caused by the pandemic. Easy, right?

Well… Imagine you have an $80 a month cellphone plan, but you can only afford $40. You know you need to either get a cheaper cellphone plan, or stop spending money on something else like, idk, your Amazon Prime and Netflix subscriptions. But then your grandparents send you birthday money and it’s $40. Nice! You can use that money to pay the bill now — but that doesn’t solve your problem long-term. You’re going to have to deal with it next month.

That’s where council is with the Safe Restart funds. Two years ago, they spent the birthday money to cover costs. Taxes didn’t increase, and services weren’t cut. It was awesome. Until now, when the money is running out and the costs are still climbing and council still hasn’t made the tough decisions about whether to unsubscribe from Netflix. I wrote about that here.

But there is still that $2-odd million dollars kicking around, and it was kind of tempting to use it to cover the cost of hiring extra police, for a year. And that idea was on the table, primarily from newbie Coun. Ron Polillo. But Cori Ramsay, the most senior member of the city’s finance committee and the person who two years ago passionately argued against putting off the tough decisions to get the city’s financial house in order and lost, was not having it this time around. She said, paraphrased, let’s not do this again. Either we want to pay for more police or we don’t, but if we do, we need to put it in our actual budget. She won, with most of council’s support.

That was the first big battle I saw. There were some other smaller ones. Sampson wanted to cut some money from human resources and emergency planning and didn’t get there. There was a debate about how much to pay on snow clearing (note: Holding budget meetings in the middle of a major snowstorm is probably a good way to dissuade people from cutting the snow clearing budget too much). Then came the next big debate.

‘With all due respect, no’

Simon Yu’s let’s-get-along approach leads to conflict

Soooooo… way back when this council was elected a few months ago, I predicted they would mostly try to get along with each other. And for the most part, I’ve been right. But last night, some cracks started to show.

Having gone through all the items it was time for council to vote on whether to accept the budget as a whole, based on what they had voted for throughout the night, which amounted to an increase of 7.58 per cent. Sampson said he wouldn’t support it, because he didn’t get the cuts he wanted which would have made the increase even lower. Polillo said he wouldn’t support it, because he didn’t get to use the Safe Restart Funding to pay for cops, which would have made the increase even lower. Seeing the writing on the wall, Garth Frizzell poined out they were heading down a road of not passing a budget at all. We all have something in here we don’t like, he said, but what are we going to do instead? Klassen and Bennett pointed out — look, this is what it costs to run the city. Then Ramsay came back in, saying it’s not ideal — but again, we just went through two years of low increases — zero percent in 2021, 3 percent in 2022. If you take the 7.5 percent increase for 2023 and average that out, you’re coming in around 5 percent… that’s not so bad! It’s not great but it’s line with what we need to do. And again “It’s a bare bones budget,” she said. (Here’s a list of the things we aren’t going to be paying for, if you’re interested!)

Then Yu made an appeal to unity: This is a difficult budget, he said. We have made some difficult decisions. It will be better for us if we present a united front.

“With all due respect, no,” Sampson said. He wanted cuts. Other councillors didn’t. He respects their decision and he wants them to respect his. He will not compromise. And Yu argued back — we all have things we’d like to see passed, he said. “It’s very, very dangerous,” he posited, if we all vote no every time the budget doesn’t go exactly our way. Sampson insisted he wasn’t being divisive but it seemed like the mayor wanted things to go that way. Ramsay chimed in with a point of order saying the discussion was getting off track, the question was called, Polillo and Sampson opposed and they went home. But… I think maybe some lines were drawn.

Read more about the budget and the debate here.

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