Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Mayor Mussallem, always the Regional District bridesmaid, never the bride


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For the second year in a row, Mayor Jack Mussallem has been thwarted in his bid to claim the Skeena-Queen Charlotte Regional District chair. Once again coming up on the short end of the vote to Barry Pages of Masset.

Mr. Pages was re-elected by a majority of the various regional directors to the position last month, with Mayor Mussallem once again having to settle for the title of Vice-Chair, a spot he gained by acclamation.

With ten directors on the voting rolls, there clearly was not enough sentiment among Regional District members to have the urban representative of group take on the top position, owing perhaps to the rivalry between the urban and rural aspects of the wide ranging district make up.

The website for SQCRD seems to be in dire need of a makeover, with some rather outdated material listed as the current feed, including such items as the listing of former Mayor Herb Pond and Councillor Tony Briglio as directors.

If nothing else however, it does show the make up of the regional district and just how hard it would be for the Mayor of Prince Rupert to gain the chair of the gathering, that despite the fact that Prince Rupert by far makes up the bulk of the population in the Regional District census area.

That's a crunching of numbers that does tend to aggravate people in Prince Rupert from time to time, with the burden of providing some funding for yet another layer of Bureaucracy that may not necessarily have the city's agenda in sync with their own.

Some of the details from that last session can be found from the Queen Charlotte Islands Observer website, which offered up this review of proceedings from the most recent Regional District meeting.

Included in that review besides the voting, was the introduction of a new treasurer for the Regional government body, as well as the the possibility of a name change for the organization to reflect the province's move towards using Haida Gwaii as the identity of the Islands from now on.

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