Notes from Nakusp Village Council’s Nov. 14 meeting:
Insuring Santa
The Village council is doing what it can to help save Nakusp’s Christmas festival.
People organizing this year’s Christmas Light Up and parade approached council for support for the Dec. 8 event.
Village staff helped get provincial approval to close over Broadway Street for the day, and will provide street barriers and will clean the garbage bins the next day. But organizers also asked for — and received — help to get insurance for the event.
That will be done by getting Society for Nakusp Community Events included under the village’s liability insurance. Councillors voted in favour of providing coverage to the Society under its policy, at a cost of $250. That will ensure organizers from litigious party-goers to the tune of about $5 million.
New internet
service
The Village of Nakusp is lending its support to a petition circulating to bring high-speed wireless internet service to unserved areas around town.
Columbia Wireless is proposing to install towers to serve the Brouse and Box Lake areas and unserviced parts of Nakusp. But first, they need an expression of interest. They need at least 100 people signing up to say they’d be interested in the service if it was provided.
“We want to support it because there are areas where people can’t get internet,” said Councillor Tom Zeleznik. “One is Summit Lake. There are over 100 people who could sign up there.”
Columbia Wireless is a family-owned Nelson-based business that provides high-speed wireless service in rural areas from Nelson and up the Slocan.
Zeleznik says the service is long overdue for some areas, and he welcomes the company’s move into the area.
“If you’ve got nothing, this is great,” he says.
Water, sewer for North Kuskanax
Residents of the North Kuskanax area will soon be getting water and sewer service from the village and paying for it for the next 20 years.
The $282,000 project will be financed by the city, with money borrowed from the Municipal Finance Authority of BC. It will then charged back to the property owners receiving the service.
The properties — located between Kuskanax Creek and the Hot Springs Road — will get water and sewer service, as well as fire hydrants. Both systems will hook up into the village’s existing water supply and treatment plants.
It’s estimated the development will cost each of the nine parcel owners $2, 374 annually. None of the cost of the improvements will come from general village tax revenues.
Visitor Centre numbers down
It may be because of this summer’s forest fires, or it may be because people get their information from the internet these days — but the village’s Visitor Centre saw a sharp drop in tourists looking for information this year.
Statistics from the Chamber of Commerce, which runs the Centre, show the number of tourists coming through their doors down 20.3 per cent in the third quarter of this year.
That makes the total year-to-date drop about 16.6 per cent. From 2012 to 2016, an average of 10,226 people came to the Centre looking for local information. This year, just 8,533 passed through.