Leafing through the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s (RMOW) 36-page cannabis retail application report in the June 20 council agenda felt almost like an epic, absurdist prank of sorts.
Here we are, five years removed from legalization, muddling through pages and pages of jargon, checking a series of boxes that never needed to be checked.
Even worse—we invented the boxes for the sole purpose of checking them.
One has to ask: how many hours of valuable staff time went into this exercise? Nearly every other municipality in B.C., and indeed Canada, has had pot shops for years. One could argue Whistler’s careful approach was time and money well spent—but where is the evidence that the relatively hands-off approach taken by other municipalities would have produced anything less desirable?
There have been few, if any, serious documented issues with cannabis retail in Canada that Pique could find evidence of. And so it comes back to a core tenet of the RMOW: A desire to exert complete control over everything occurring within municipal boundaries.
The multi-year effort to finally bring cannabis retail to Whistler is a make-work project if there ever was one. It’s hard to see how this process was necessary in any sense.
But this kind of roundabout, over-produced method is not uncommon at Whistler’s town hall.
The question of efficiency is impossible to ignore when you look at the RMOW’s annual Statement of Financial Information (SOFI) report, presented on the same June 20 agenda.
The number of municipal employees making more than $75K hit 169 in 2022—an 8.3-per-cent increase from the 156 on the list in 2021, which itself was 22-per-cent higher than the 128 in 2020.
From 2014 to 2017, the RMOW’s payroll largely stayed stagnant, hovering around the $29.5 million mark, with about 105 employees making more than $75,000 (give or take a few each year).
In 2018 that number jumped to 113 (total payroll: $32.7 million); and it jumped again in 2019 to 127 (total payroll: $33 million).
In 2020, plagued by COVID rollbacks and temporary layoffs, both numbers stayed flat at 128 and $32.9 million.
In 2021, the number of employees making more than $75,000 jumped again, to 156, and in 2022 it hit a record high of 169.
Mercifully, total payroll costs have held mostly steady since 2018, at about $32 million per year. It should also be noted that inflation and the general cost of living is still on the rise, and the RMOW is not immune to those pressures.
With the RMOW making big changes internally this year, shuffling responsibilities amongst divisions and adding new senior management roles, we will be paying close attention to what next year’s SOFI report contains in terms of payroll totals.
Ever-climbing dollar figures and endless staff reports would be easier to digest if we were getting proven value for our money in each case. But in some instances that is just simply not happening.
Case in point: Does anyone you know personally (who doesn’t work for municipal hall) know what The Whistler Sessions is? Have you spoken with anyone who does know what it is that thinks it was a good way to spend our time and money? I can’t answer yes to either of those questions.
Again, it can be argued that this was a valuable exercise—we should always be looking to the future, after all—but there is also an argument to be made that The Whistler Sessions amounts to little more than a $200,000 art project. Did we really need to invest countless hours and dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into another consultant’s bank account so they can tell us that, in the future, things will either be very good, very bad, or somewhere in the middle? Isn’t the Balance Model Initiative doing this same work?
Whatever the result, this project was a luxury that most communities would never consider (or have the means to even entertain the idea).
Another glaring example of things perhaps not operating as they should is the municipal communications department, which has a budget of $749,758 in 2023.
RMOW communications can sometimes take weeks to produce answers to even seemingly straightforward questions—and sometimes you won’t get a response at all.
Pique has made the point for years that the entire process would be much smoother for all involved if reporters could engage directly with staff—you know, the ones in the SOFI report with all the knowledge, getting paid so much money—as they are allowed to do in many other jurisdictions.
The excuse is that they’re busy doing their jobs. Well, one might argue we pay them enough that sharing their expertise with reporters—and in so doing, the community—should be part of their jobs, too.
But then the RMOW loses its vice-like grip on its messaging. Can’t have that.
As for communications, sometimes it has the effect of actively working against getting timely and useful info out to the community.
Take the most recent reports of a grizzly in Rainbow, for which the RMOW issued alerts on its social channels on the morning of June 18. The RMOW said it was sharing the info on behalf of the Conservation Officer Service (COS).
Pique reported on the posts that morning, and late that afternoon, a communications official reached out to say the RMOW “incorrectly put up a social post” about the grizzly, but that it didn’t intend to.
OK. So how did your messaging get mixed up? Was there a grizzly in Rainbow on June 18 or not?
Pique didn’t get a response until late the next morning, which said the info about the grizzly bear accidentally got “loaded” from a previous wildlife alert.
But, Pique pointed out, that doesn’t make any sense—the post in question was tailor-made by someone in the communications department, and there were no recent, comparable grizzly bear reports that it could have been “pulled” from.
The next day, June 20, the RMOW responded again, saying it did not “receive a grizzly bear alert” from the COS. OK, Pique said again—that may technically be true, but did the COS receive reports of a grizzly bear in Rainbow or not?
The RMOW would not answer that question directly, no matter how many times Pique asked, saying it could not speak for the COS. The COS, likewise, did not respond.
So was a grizzly reported in Rainbow on June 18? Reading between the lines, we believe there was. But we will have to wait for the results of a Freedom of Information request to tell you with any certainty (assuming the whole thing isn’t redacted).
For context, Pique emailed the Town of Banff to ask about its grizzly policy, and how it communicates with the public.
The town issues alerts if there is immediate danger, but only as a last resort, said communications manager Jason Darrah.
“Notification online or other mass communications methods is proven to attract more sight-seekers to the area, which will usually hinder control measures and may increase hazard risks,” Darrah said in an email. “We have means of communicating to specific businesses, organizations or event organizers, if needed, rather than mass communications that include locations.”
Look at that—direct, straightforward communication, received within two hours of the question being posed.
It is telling that Pique had to get this information from a town in another province. But it is par for the course with Whistler’s upside-down relationship with transparency.
This is not meant to paint the RMOW as the incompetent bad guy. Municipal staffers work hard every day to make this place as great as it is. Nobody wants to see people lose their jobs, or local services cut.
But by the same token, in many cases, taxpayers are very clearly not getting good value for their money—as all of the above points illustrate.
Who will tighten up this massive and ever-growing ship? We wait patiently, as always, for answers.
