New park, clean air on Vernon agenda

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Cumming said the feasibility study will be “looking forward” to see if the proposal is possible, affordable or would have to be done in phases.

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Complaints over air quality, especially when roads are dirty after the winter months, prompted council to recently approve the purchase of a vacuum truck to clean the streets.

“We’ve bought a very expensive, big vacuum truck,” said Cumming. “Instead of just brushing it and sweeping it and — you all notice that on a dry day there is a super big cloud of dust going behind the street sweepers — this will actually be a moving, enormous vacuum.

“It prevents the dust from going into the air.”

Fearing future spring flooding in parts of the city, council has approved hiring a full-time drainage engineer.

“Adaptation is really going to be critical. People know what’s happened when we get these heavy rain events and rain on snow events.”

Council is also expecting to have a complete climate action plan in its hands by the end of April that is expected to act as a guide for the city.

“We purchased a new electric vehicle last year. We’re waiting for it to be delivered. We also purchased a series of electric bikes for staff and we released one of our cars.”

Looking back, Cumming said significant construction in Vernon was a major highlight of 2019.

“There’s been a significant amount of private sector investment in the community and that shows up everywhere, whether you are in the commercial, industrial or residential.”

He said “many more people who were looking for places to live in Vernon had found them.

“I know it hasn’t caught the front page (but) it’s been the biggest investment in the millions, tens of millions.”

What has been on the front page instead have been issues of public safety and the street-entrenched population which often gets the blame for criminal activity.

Cumming said there is “a small amount of people that are homeless and there has been significant effort over the last four or five years, by former councils as well as ours.”

He pointed to the openings earlier this year of Our Place, an emergency homeless shelter, and supportive housing called My Place.

He added other social housing was also in the pipeline.

In terms of safety, Cumming said the city is allocating more than one-quarter of the money collected from taxpayers on the RCMP and bylaw department.

“We’ve seen Vernon crime statistics getting better all the time in terms of less crime and I think that’s critical. Sometimes the crime numbers go up and that’s because the RCMP are doing a bang up job of apprehending those who are misbehaving.”

The mayor also defended a proposed 4.9 percent hike in 2020 property taxes.

He said a 1.9 percent infrastructure levy is tacked on every year to maintain water, pavement and waste water management while another two percent was “basically the cost of living.”

He said the difference between those two figures and 4.9 percent “is quite small and there are things there that we think the community really wanted.”