So, has incorporation been worth it?
As outlined in the articles on page one and page A3, property owners in Clearwater are about to be hit with a 9.5 per cent tax increase. This comes on top of a tax increase last year of nearly six per cent.
Were the nay-sayers right? Will incorporation prove to be too expensive for this community? Would we have been better off to stay an improvement district?
The short answer is no, the nay-sayers were not right. Taxes are going up, but that's largely because they were kept artificially low for a couple of years as a result of the Canfor-Vavenby closure. That, plus the fact that the District is now taking over road maintenance and so we no longer have much wiggle room.
If we had remained an improvement district, we wouldn't have had that flexibility.
We need to remember how property values in this community collapsed after the closures of the Camp Two and then the Weyerhaeuser sawmills.
That didn't happen this time (although, admittedly, Canfor did say the Vavenby closure was temporary – but no one knew when or even if it would reopen).
We also shouldn't forget the $2.5 million that was spent on forest fuel management projects in this area during the shutdown. Without a town council to lobby for the money, and without a professional town staff to administer the money once it got here, we almost certainly would not have received as much of this assistance as we did.
Those forest fuel management cheques, plus the relief on local taxes, helped people stay in this community who otherwise wold have left. Having those experienced and skilled millworkers available helped Canfor immeasurably when it reopened.
And what about the millions of dollars in other grants the municipality has received since incorporation? Things like the renovations to the sewage lagoons are not very glamorous, but essential – and expensive.
Improvement districts do not get grants from senior levels of government. I'll repeat that: improvement districts do not get grants from senior levels of government.
The trustees of the former Clearwater Improvement District did an amazing job in building up the infrastructure we have but they did it entirely using local property taxes.
They did it on the cheap, however, and that reluctance to spend money is now coming back to haunt us.
Now we are going to have to spend more money than we would like to bring our infrastructure up to where we want it.
That doesn't mean we should dream about reverting to improvement district status.
Instead, we should embrace the opportunities that incorporation brings. It's all part of growing up.