Wayne Carson, Central Okanagan West led the charge to get a better deal for North Westside residents.

Image Credit: Facebook/Wayne Carson

The years-long frustration by a few hundred rural residents to get their voices heard by the Central Okanagan Regional District is being shared by others sitting around that table.

The board is so strongly dominated by Kelowna that residents of the North Westside area, led by their director Wayne Carson, convinced the province to come to their aid through a governance study.

The final report of that study was presented to the regional district board earlier this week with its single resolution being that the North Westside’s 1,200 residents join the North Okanagan Regional District.

“I understand the frustration of a community whose decisions are made by a majority of people who don’t live in that community and are not affected in the same way as those who live in the community,” Peachland Mayor Cindy Fortin said during a board meeting earlier this week.

Her community of 5,800 gets two of 52 weighted votes on the board, which is one less than the three votes carried by the 2,900 people living in Central Okanagan West, of which the North Westside is a part.

Kelowna gets 33.

READ MORE: North Westside residents want out of Central Okanagan Regional District

For Jordan Coble, the Westbank First Nation representative on the board, the frustration is of a slightly different nature. Even though there are almost 11,000 people living on their lands, the First Nation has a voice but no vote on the regional board.

“I’m interested in what the next steps are going to unveil for us and what is going to be the fate of my community, my people, and how do we get a voice around this table that is as impassioned as director Carson’s,” Coble said. “I like to think I can do a pretty good job but, like I said, I’m pretty limited in the influence I have around this table.”

He was told by board chair Loyal Wooldridge that the provincial government is looking into giving regional district votes to First Nation representatives but, as he understands it, current legislation requires them to sign treaties first.

Carson was praised around the table for his dogged efforts to get the study done after he spent years struggling to get his constituents’ voices heard.

“On service issues provided by the regional district, I tried to get a stronger voice in those,” he said. “It didn’t happen. I tried to get some influence. It didn’t happen. So we’re where we are today.”

He pointed out that police, ambulance, school and other services that are provided by the province all come through the North Okanagan Regional District.

Carson recently found out, for example, that the crime rate in his area has gone up but only learned that through a police update to the North Okanagan board.

It’s highly unusual for regional district boundaries to change in B.C., Allan Nielson, the principal with Neilson Strategies who did the study, told the board.

There was a regional district amalgamation in the Fraser Valley in 1995 and a split in the Comox Strathcona Regional District in 2008, he said.

In the end, the Central Okanagan board voted unanimously to ask the provincial government to move ahead with the next level of study for the North Westside to join the North Okanagan.

That will require agreement by both regional districts.

Somewhere in the process there also needs to be a look at what will happen to the remaining 1,700 residents who live in scattered areas of Central Okanagan West, some of whom are south of Peachland.

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