Its a council day for me. I'm here in Vernon attending the Southern Interior Local Government Association (SILGA) conference. This conference brings together elected people from the BC southern interior to network, learn, and lobby.
So far today, the highlights have been:
- a motivational keynote on communications and "personal leadership" from Michelle Ray. She passed on some great tidbits on listening skills - :).
- a short presentation from Telus' Steve Jenkins on "green solutions for local governments". For the past 10 years, Telus has been working on reducing their environmental footprint in a measurable, structured fashion. I wonder if Telus reps pass on this information to small and medium size businesses as well. I think that might be useful for businesses who may not have the Telus' ability to experiment and trial.
- a great session on the action model used by the Vernon "Partners for a Safe and Healthy Community" group - that ensures that the initiative is not just a talk shop, but actually motivates action and accomplishes tasks.
We also had a short resolutions session. We debate resolutions and then vote to see if they become part of SILGA policy. The town of Lumby had a particularly contentious resolution asking that we adopt policy asking the province to give non resident property owning corporations a vote. This would mean, I imagine, that corporations like Walmart or Domtar would have one vote in every BC community where it operates.
This resolution was narrowly defeated. I voted against it, not so much because I believe non resident business property owners should not have a vote, but because I don't think that we in Kamloops have ever treated a non resident business operating in our community differently than a locally owned business. I think we treat them both as consituents who we need to work with and respond to.
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