Dear Editor:
I am completely disgusted with our local politicians on both sides of the "North Vancouver divide" protecting their little fiefdoms, and refusing to even consider amalgamation, other than to have another study of a study to study what might be studied in this regard. Bravo to Couns. Heywood, Bell and MacKay-Dunn for attempting to push this forward, and thank you to Reka Charlton for an excellent letter to this paper (March 12).
I own property in both the city and the district and there is really no difference between the two in terms of the taxes I pay to both and the services I receive or the facilities I use in both. Coun. Bookham's concerns about the "cultural differences" were utterly ridiculous, and more about self-preservation than protecting the people. It seems to me that the people in both the city and the district "aspire" to being one joined and more cost-effective community. There are hundreds of thousands of tax dollars being wasted while we continue this bloated bureaucratic duplication. Thank goodness the North Vancouver School District can manage all the schools in the city and the district under one superintendent rather than two, or there really would be no money getting to the classrooms. It is high time we had one mayor for all of North Vancouver, fewer councillors in total, and we weeded out all the other duplicated city managers and expensive department heads.And for heaven's sake, rather than the current situation (the city fire chief in charge of only one fire station, making virtually the same mega salary as other fire chiefs in much larger multi-station departments in normal-sized municipalities) could we please have a single fire chief to run the handful of North Shore stations that already respond to fires across the current silly and arbitrary municipal boundaries?
Michele Payne
North Vancouver
