The mayor's traditional annual media lunch every January at the MysteryLake Motor Hotel's Adventurers
North dining room is unfailingly a long but interesting Thursday afternoon.
No one seems quite certain how it started, but Mayor Tim Johnston's predecessor as mayor, Bill Comaskey, apparently also hosted such a get-together.
In a way it's a kind of hybrid event. There's no tape recorders, cameras or notebooks recording Johnston's every utterance, but at the same time it is not a strictly off-the-record lunch either.
While the mayor probably hopes for some discretion - as even journalists might for themselves in such a mixed business/social setting - in not having some of his more colourful characterizations show up in print or on air in the next news cycle, Johnston has never complained about being quoted for something he's said. That's a rare enough virtue in a politician.
The lunch then is something akin to what might be called background-plus, where information can be attributed specifically to the source, if it's the mayor, but other participants (the mayor changes the cast of characters he invites to mix it up a bit every year. Mark Matiasek, general manager of Thompson Unlimited was invited this year) share in the meal and conversation, but don't usually have comments directly attributed to them.
What Johnston does is use the lunch to send a signal about where he hopes to see council and the city go in the coming year. It's not so much new revelations as a matter of him bringing some threads together and choosing his emphasis.
While Johnston will look back at the previous year briefly, it's more his style to look forward rather than backward. This, of course, is the fourth and final year of council's term with the next municipal election nine months from today on Oct. 27, making this year's lunch of even more than usual interest.
Very top of the list for Johnston, he says, is getting the first shovel in the ground finally for the new Thompson campus of the University College of the North (UCN), in this case starting the student housing component. The project was announced by former NDP premier Gary Doer on a visit here March 13, 2007. It is to be completed in 2013.
Second up is creating a new water utility- with residents paying for metered water - originally planned for Jan. 1, 2011, but now on a very tight deadline for that date. Despite widespread misperception and chatter about the 1956 "founding" agreement, there is no such thing as "free" Vale Inco water, Johnston has long argued; residents are paying for the distribution cost as a less transparent charge in their general tax levy.
Also, Johnston thinks the time to create a $4-million water utility - followed by a new $25-million wastewater treatment plant - is now, or at least soon, when senior levels of government are offering grants to cover up to 60 per cent of the capital costs - meaning local residents will, Johnston hopes, not end up paying more than 40 per cent of those costs. The province has made it crystal clear for their part that unless the city starts charging residents for water, there won't be any provincial money to help defray the cost of a new wastewater treatment plant.
While there isn't much surprising, or new per se in Johnston's stance on UCN, a water utility, or new wastewater treatment plant, it was interesting to hear him say now is also the time for the city to finally take ownership of the ongoing problems at both the Thompson Recycling Centre and Thompson Zoo.
Both have had, and continue to have, very visible problems - quite literally in some cases - over the last couple of years, and both are run by arms-length boards of directors.
Their payroll and certain other administrative functions are processed by the City of Thompson on their behalf, even though they are not city employees and oversight is limited, yet they both receive their major sources of funding annually from the city.
The Thompson Public Library is a third external organization set up and funded in much the same way as the Thompson Zoo and the Thompson Recycling Centre, but has not been in the spotlight for any substantive problems over the last couple of years.
We made a similar argument to Johnston's a year ago in this space, suggesting the structures setting up and governing these so-called arms-length external organizations date from another era - where well-meaning volunteers drove most everything in Thompson - and that is exactly the crux of the problem and is not an acceptable way today to run either a municipal zoo or recycling centre in a city of 16,000. The last year has done nothing but confirm our earlier judgment on that point.
"The City of Thompson should show some real leadership here, which amounts to more than having an arms-length approach with only a councillor sitting on the centre's board of directors," we wrote here Jan. 28, 2009. "Wake up. That's a day late and a dollar short."
We're glad to hear the mayor appears to be on the same wavelength on this issue.
