Powell River Regional District’s chair is hoping that playing squash is avoided with the new class of ferry that will be serving the Westview to Vancouver Island route.
At the February regional board meeting, Patrick Brabazon, who is also director for Electoral Area A, said he attended a ferry advisory committee (FAC) meeting and learned that some issues surrounding the replacement of the Queen of Burnaby on Route 17 have not been resolved.
“These include vehicle access to the lower deck and the chair of the FAC provided us a nice photograph of a similar arrangement on a ferry in Europe,” Brabazon said. “As you may be aware, there are going to be two decks proposed for this next ferry. You drive in at the upper deck level but the ramp will go down, if I remember correctly, into the bowels of the vessel. Anyone with claustrophobia is probably going to have fits at that.”
Brabazon said an unresolved matter was the possibility of a scheduled stop on Route 17 in Blubber Bay, which Sandy McCormick, Electoral Area D director for Texada Island, has been advocating “most strongly.” The suggestion is for a twice-a-day stop at Blubber Bay to provide people leaving from Texada Island with a direct route to Vancouver Island.
Regarding another issue brought up at the FAC meeting, Brabazon said a membership situation that he had talked about in past appears to have been resolved.
“BC Ferries has indicated that the current membership will be reappointed,” Brabazon said. “This means that Sandy McCormick will stay as one of the two members from Texada. Unresolved are the two vacancies on the city side of the table.”
As for school sports teams, Brabazon said School District 47 has provided BC Ferries with all of the data the ferry corporation said it needed before a decision could be made on whether local sports teams could travel for free. On Route 3 between Langdale and Horseshoe Bay, students and sports teams travel for free because there is a half a per cent assessment on ticket prices on the route that pays for the free travel.
“It’s quite evident that if they do something on Route 7 [Saltery Bay - Earls Cove] it will be something similar,” Brabazon said. “If it’s a 0.5 per cent increase, I guess nobody is going to complain, but if more than that, who knows?”
