EDITORIAL – Another motion from the mayor stumbles, but wait for what’s next
(Image: CFJC)
An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.
YOU’D THINK helping the homeless get back home would be a no-brainer but, true to form, Kamloops City council messed it up at their meeting Tuesday.
This time, all of council including Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson are the culprits. Hamer-Jackson had given notice the previous meeting of a proposal asking for a new program to provide assistance for homeless folks wanting to return to their home towns.
Trouble is, he woke up Tuesday morning to read a Castanet story saying neither the federal nor provincial funding he’d hoped to access for his idea is any longer available.
At the council meeting, community and protective services director Byron McCorkell confirmed he’d told that to a reporter. He didn’t say whether he planned to share the information with the mayor.
At any rate, Hamer-Jackson wanted to postpone his motion until Sept. 26 so he could study the funding issues.
Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Good proposals are getting shut-down by the spiteful little minds orchestra which is under direction by the backroom dodgers. What this mayor has done, without knowing, expose the severe lack of honesty permeating City Hall.
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I was appajjed when Hamer Jackson was first elected, I did not think that he stood a chance against Dieter Dudy, however, I am now far more appalled at the actions of the council, and some City Hall staffers. The fact that. McCorkle gave this information to a news outlet and withheld it from the mayor is just petty and childish.
I still believe that anyone running for the mayors chair should have had previous counsel experience, however, he is starting to look better than all of them
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It’s the job of sr admin to provide information to council not withhold info. As the acting CAO in Trawin’s absence McCorkell new of the mayors proposal from the previous meeting, yet he knowingly withheld information to undermine the mayor. This is the same man who oversaw the bylaw debacle which saw 25 employees all over the age of 25 get fired from their jobs and replaced by kids all under the age of 25. And we keep hearing how city hall is running along fine despite all the distractions from council.
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Why would a senior administrator keep information from the mayor? It’s almost like City Hall admin are trying to make his job harder, but that can’t be true, can it?
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ASK appears to now confirm what was long suspected, that homeless are being shipping out, with the presumption they’re also being shipped in. A recent article confirms what proponents have long denied – that homeless individuals choose to come to Kamloops to take advantage of services. As stated famously in Field of Dreams – if you build it, they will come.
This will never be fixed. This will never get better. There is no solution within reach of anything resembling reasonable expenditures. We have decided to feed and focus money and effort to facilitate addiction, refuse to clear encampments next to homes, given the reigns to single-minded evangelists of consumption, and that genie isn’t going back in the bottle unless arrests and forced treatment become a widely used tool. Until a political shift happens to usher this in, it’s FUBAR for this town.
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A one-time purchase of personalized lunch boxes with the copyright logo might just work. Composting of uneaten foodstuff to lead by example.
There will be no checking of what others brought in their lunch box, however. Leave that one to George and Vladi.
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