Thank you Revelstoke for your overwhelming support.

This community has invested years of staff time, consultant fees, and volunteer effort into creating an Official Community Plan, strategic plans, and strategies. Those documents represent real consultation with real residents. They should be the starting point for council decisions and adopted as guides to understand the community’s vision.

That means measuring proposals against what has already been adopted, being honest in public when we are departing from a plan and why, and updating plans deliberately rather than quietly shelving them.

We also have qualified people already sitting on our committees, residents who volunteered real expertise and are willing to use it. Those committees should be asked to test proposals against the lenses of equity, climate, and community wellbeing while a decision is still being shaped, not consulted once it has effectively been made.

Following our plans also means council doing its own job of setting direction. Council is elected to give staff clear priorities drawn from the plans this community adopted, and staff are there to carry them out with their expertise. When that runs the other way around, the community’s vision stops being the thing that decides, and council is left reacting to whatever arrives in the agenda package.

New projects come with ribbon-cuttings. Repairing aging infrastructure is less exciting. But deferred maintenance is a debt that compounds, and we are seeing the real impacts of neglecting aging infrastructure through our issues with sewage treatment, aging bridges, and the state of the Revelstoke Forum.

I want capital planning that funds renewal of the systems we already own first, with the condition of those assets and the cost of waiting laid out plainly in public before council commits to anything new and large.

It’s also time to lobby the Province for greater support for Resort Municipalities. Our infrastructure bears the weight of our tourism economy, and that burden shouldn’t fall on municipal taxpayers. Revelstoke is not alone in facing these types of challenges, and by joining forces with other Resort Municipalities, we can make a strong case to the Province for a greater share of the economic benefits of tourism.

Wildfire smoke, snowpack, and heat are not abstractions here. They shape whether people can breathe on an August afternoon, whether people can recreate outdoors, and whether the sectors that employ this town have a season at all.

Council should be weighing climate risk in the same breath as cost when it makes decisions about land use, infrastructure, and emergency preparedness. Our future as a community is inextricably linked to the environmental future of our region and our planet.

Revelstoke has the chance to demonstrate leadership. Being solutions-oriented means starting from what a problem actually needs rather than from what we have always done, and being willing to try an innovative idea here when the usual approach isn’t working.

It also means being just as willing to take up an innovative solution someone else has already put to work, rather than insisting on inventing our own version of everything. Other towns are working through aging infrastructure, climate risk, and the pressures of a visitor economy, and some of them have found approaches worth borrowing. Learning from what our peers have tried lets us solve our own problems faster, and at less cost, than starting from a blank page every time.

At the table, that means judging an idea on whether it would work here, asking what has already been tested elsewhere before council commissions something new, and sharing what we learn so the communities we borrow from get something back.