Editor:
Some folks in Sechelt are crowing that “Sechelt never looked better.”
Perhaps they don’t realize that it might be because Sechelt’s debt ratio has never looked worse. Rock walls, fancy signage, hedging cedars and painted sunshiny crosswalks all cost money and were only made possible by borrowing for the treatment plant and freeing up reserve money.
Sechelt’s debt service limit as legislated by the province has increased from 17 per cent to a full 44 per cent. The estimated debt service for the treatment plant loan will drain approximately $830,000 from the sewer reserve every year for the next 10 years — fees paid by Sechelt taxpayers who are sewer users. Hardly “no cost to the taxpayer” as a recent letter to the editor claimed.
The purchase of Lot L was also funded with sewer reserve monies (a statutory reserve fund which stipulates that money in the fund can only be used for sewer projects). One would think that if Lot L is deemed not necessary for sewer use, the money received from selling it should by rights be returned to the reserve account for other sewer needs, forestalling increases in sewer rates. Returning the money may not be a legal requirement, but would most certainly seem to be the most ethical course of action.
Ann Kershaw, Sechelt
