PETERS – Noble Creek Irrigation System a hot potato no one wants to hold
City utility services manager Greg Whiteman speaks to Noble Creek Irrigation System users during recent meeting. (Image: Mel Rothenburger.)
THE NOBLE CREEK IRRIGATION SYSTEM situation has ballooned into one of the most confounding conundrums the City of Kamloops has faced in decades.
It should never have come to this point.
The irrigation system has become a hot potato no one wants to be caught holding.
The city as an urban municipality should not be in the business of agricultural irrigation.
It’s as if a government was providing an input for a manufacturing business. This is not the role of a municipal corporation.
The problem is, it has been in that business for decades and no previous councils have demonstrated the vision to foresee the liability this could eventually present to all of the city’s water ratepayers or leadership to get the city out of it.
James Peters is the radio anchor at CFJC, coming to Kamloops in 2006. He anchors the afternoon news on B-100 and 98.3 CIFM, and contributes weekly editorials to the CFJC Evening News. He tweets regularly @Jamloops.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Governments, self-declared experts and lovers of control over any and all matters it seems, have been involving themselves in areas they ought not to more and more. They operate under the principle of “big government is good, and bigger government is even better.” It isn’t. Big government sucks, actually, and almost always costs more money than having actual private industry professionals perform the work required. The users of the Noble Cr system have proposed forming a society to take over the system, and this is what should happen once the intake is repaired. Various levels of Big Government foot-dragging bureaucracy, and buck-passing have led to the current state of disrepair, so the users, if they are willing to take over, should not be handed a broken system, however they should, ultimately, be allowed, even required, to take it over, while assuming the responsibility of future maintenance and operational costs. It seems they are willing to do that, so let them.
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And yet the evil “government” allows free-enterprise to thrive. For example what would it take to make real estate transactions no more onerous (and way less expensive) than say vehicles transactions? It could be done. And don’t forget that real estate developers have thrived in Kamloops for years with little interference form their friends at the City. And don’t forget that certain private sectors contractors have found a gold mine, a very lucrative one, working almost exclusively for the City. And don’t forget that various councils have allowed this situation to go unresolved for years.
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Why then did the city take farm land into the city in 1973 and leave us alone. I think if the city shuts the system down after 50 years then they will be liable for our lost crops as we are city tax payers and the city just did not maintain the system.
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