Silver Star Community Springs Into Action!

Firstly, thank you to all those who attended the second round of Silverhawk meetings on Sunday at the NATC. It is testament to the passion felt in the community with regard to this matter that so many of you turned out on a seriously spring afternoon!

We have now completed the 3 cohort meetings and we have to say we have been genuinely surprised by the enthusiasm shown for what the SSPOA has proposed from the vast majority of attendees. Thank you for your support.

As promised, the following documents are now available on the SSPOA website. Please follow the links:

Brief  to Government:
https://www.sspoa.ca/wp-content/uploads//Silver-Star-Sewer-A-TIME-FOR-CHANGE-Mar.-5-2018.pdf
Correspondence with Silverhawk:
https://www.sspoa.ca/sspoa-publishes-brief/
Terms of Reference for the Sewer Action Fund Governance Committee:
https://www.sspoa.ca/terms-reference-sewage-action-fund/

As ever, it was great to hear the opinions of the community. We should like to make two things abundantly clear:

1) Initiating legal action is the very last thing that the SSPOA would wish to do. Our preference (which we think is consistent with the views we heard) is for government to provide suitable regulation as it does with all other monopolistic utility services.

However, excluding taking legal advice at this point would seem to be counter productive.

2) The SSPOA would very much welcome the waste water service being taken over by a responsible third party. The Regional District of North Okanagan would appear to be in the best position to balance cost with community involvement and governance.

This has been an ongoing topic of conversation with the Chief Administration Officer since this file was opened. From some of the comments made at the meeting, it would appear that the RDNO’s position has changed. We will of course be following this up with both our elected representative and the CAO in the very near future.

Out of an abundance of caution, we will change the name of the Legal Defence Fund and rename this as the Silver Star Property Owners Sewage Action Fund (SSSAF).

We trust that the above statements clarify the position of the SSPOA.

Over the next two weeks, we will finalize membership of the Sewage Action Fund Governance Committee, specifically, the representatives for cohort 1. We will then advise how you can make your contribution. We would like to thank Robert Foord and Rob Tupper for agreeing to represent cohorts 2 and 3.

In the meantime, please talk to your neighbours about this community initiative. Please feel free to forward to owners who could not attend and encourage them to send their email address to utilities@sspoa.ca .We will then be able to provide them with upcoming information.

We will communicate again at the beginning of April, but we just wanted to say “thank you” for your support and to test as many of the email addresses that have been collected as easily as possible.