For one brief shining second there it looked like the Cowichan Valley Regional District might actually do something about regional recreation.
And then the light was snuffed out by the usual cowardly retreat into the bureaucratic black hole.
See here’s the thing. At the CVRD board table rarely do the directors like to make an actual, hard and fast decision on a controversial topic. Every iteration of the board down through the years has been the same in this regard. They chew endlessly over the subject at hand in the way only an elected body made up of 15 people can, going round and round stating and re-stating the same things for hours upon hours of unproductive, put-you-to-sleep redundancy.
Which would be all well and good if at the end of those hours of repetition a decision was made — that’s often the nature of democracy after all. But no, at the CVRD board they are famous for backing away from casting that final vote and instead killing a thing by referral.
In this way, they never have to tell the public that they’ve well and truly ditched something, they can instead say it’s working its way through the process. Which is technically true, we suppose, but the unvarnished outcome is that these pesky topics disappear from the public eye back into committee agendas and staff reports and studies, sometimes never to be heard from again, sometimes found in a figurative back closet covered in layers of dust years later, made obsolete by time and neglect.
The non-decision made at Friday’s CVRD board meeting on regional recreation was even more nebulous than usual — a commitment to merely explore the idea of establishing sub-regional committees. Which is really no commitment at all and something we expect to blow away like so much cottonwood down. All while the directors are being told in no uncertain terms that the status quo is not an option.
Time for this nonsense to end. Or it sounds like not making a decision is going to make the decision for you in a way nobody wants.