Councils' orientation to staff to investigate erecting billboards along the highway during the prelude to the Olympics is a sad indicator of our community direction ["Council Supports Regional Growth Strategy," The Chief, June 5].
To even contemplate billboards firstly ignores existing bylaws but much more importantly the concept flies in the face of everything that many in the community believe Squamish stands for.
We live in an area of incredible natural beauty and unparalleled recreational opportunities. If only we defined ourselves by these two outstanding qualities, deliberations over billboards wouldn't even receive the light of day let alone waste precious staff time on a prospect that is repellent to a large part of the community.
It seems obvious to me that outdoor recreation tourism and the mutually complimentary knowledge-based/information technology industries are the two clearest paths forward as economic generators for our community, unless becoming just another bedroom community of Vancouver is all we aspire to be.
Regrettably, council's recent actions with regards to the Squamish Sustainability Corporation (SSC) have effectively killed the modest steps being taken towards the development of a local tourism industry.
The SSC, run by a board of volunteer business leaders, was mandated to stimulate both tourism and knowledge based industries. In the past few years they have quietly moved forward on the creation of a Destination Management Organization (DMO), Tourism Squamish, a tourism website, a funding mechanism through an industry supported Hotel Tax and a regional tourism strategy that was to use the Adventure Centre (AC) as a portal to the Sea to Sky area.
In addition, the SSC board had to manage the complex functioning of the AC (the retail store, operations and maintenance of the building and tourism sales on behalf of local tourism businesses) while sharing space with the Chamber of Commerce who illogically, given the existence of the SSC, still manage the Visitor Information Centre (VIC).
The SSC can be criticized for not creating tangible tourism product on the ground, but now that the SSC board has been forced to resign en masse, we now have council, with no tourism related experience as far as I can see, running the whole shebang.
I just don't get it. We no longer have an Economic Development Office. Brent Leigh, the one person at City Hall who demonstrated some sort of new vision also resigned.
So where does that leave us? With a council intent on centralizing decision making, a council that faced with the marketing opportunity of a lifetime (the 2010 Olympics) and the best they can come up with is billboards along the highway?
Jim Harvey
Garibaldi Highlands
