Tuesday January 15, 2013 (Vol. 38 No. 5)
V O I C E
O F
W H I T E
R O C K
A N D
S O U T H
S U R R E Y
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Step by step: The White Rock Avalon Women’s Centre, managed by Cindy Morrison, is providing women from all walks of life the tools and support they need to deal with addictions. › see page 11
Widow’s home reported as having a 8,791-sq.-ft. second floor over a 1,746-sq.-ft. main floor
Typo sends house assessment soaring Jeff Nagel Black Press
Shirley Paulenko just about panicked when she opened her property assessment to find the value of her South Surrey house had soared 43 per cent in a single year. The $450,000 jump in her assessment to more than $1.5 million would mean a big jump in the
recently widowed senior’s property tax bill. “I was so flabbergasted,” Paulenko said last week. “I lost a night’s sleep. I thought, ‘holy man, how could this possibly be going up by this much money?’” Her son looked at the assessment notice for the two-storey home near 140 Street and 26 Avenue
and found the answer. It showed she lives in what friends now joke is the “mushroom house” – a 1,746-sq.-ft. first floor with a giant 8,791-sq.-ft. second storey somehow perched on top. BC Assessment says a typing error added a fourth digit for the second floor by mistake. Assessors have now corrected
both the square footage and reduced Paulenko’s assessment to just over $1.1 million, an eightper-cent increase Paulenko still has her doubts about. But it’s not the only case where residents in the region are complaining about either errors or unusual changes in the assessment authority’s calculation of their house size.
“I think there’s going to be a whole pile of these errors,” said Surrey accountant Cindy Konkin. She and her husband are appealing their Newton house’s 8.6-percent assessment increase to $554,000 because it shows what they say is a fictitious 1,100-sq.-ft. increase in the size of the home. › see page 4
Without warning Tracy Holmes Staff Reporter
Eight blocks of South Surrey’s 8 Avenue – between 192 and 200 Streets – were closed for two days last week, as crews repaired damage triggered by heavy rains. “It’s a pretty major job,” said Jeff Welch, the City of Surrey’s southend roads and drainage manager. “We’re going down basically 30 feet and having to build the road up 30 feet, so there’s lots of gravel, there’s lots of riprap, lots of stabilization that has to be done to make sure the road doesn’t slip away.” At about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, a portion of the shoulder on the road’s south side washed out in the 19500-block. It would have been impossible to predict, Welch said.
Nick Greenizan photo
Crews work to repair 8 Avenue, after the South Surrey road’s shoulder washed out in the 19500-block early Wednesday. The road reopened Friday.
No memory after inadvertently consuming whisky with prescription medication, Charles says
Semiahmoo councillor’s impaired-driving conviction upheld Tracy Holmes Staff Reporter
A Semiahmoo First Nation councillor has lost an appeal of her convictions for impaired and dangerous driving. Joanne Charles fought the convictions – handed down in August 2011 – on the basis that Crown lawyers did not prove she had intended to commit the offence, according to a B.C. Court of Appeal Joanne Charles judgment rendered last week. band spokesperson Charles – the spokesperson for Semi-
ahmoo First Nation – was arrested more than 20 kilometres from her home, where she had consumed a family member’s prescription-strength pain pills and up to four ounces of whisky. Charles testified she has no recollection of what happened between the drink and when she woke up in a jail cell. The argument didn’t sway B.C. Appeal Court Justice Jon Sigurdson. “The evidence clearly shows that she voluntarily and recklessly embarked on
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a course of ingestion of alcohol and drugs that led to her intoxication,” Sigurdson writes in his reasons for judgment posted online Thursday. Reached by phone that afternoon, Charles initially said she had “no idea” about the matter, but upon further questions confirmed it was her case. She asked where Peace Arch News got the information. “Why are you wanting to do anything with that?” she said. “Personally, I’d like
you not to report on anything.” Charles ended the call when told her request couldn’t be honoured. According to the judgment, on Sept. 6, 2008 Charles was found behind the wheel of a truck that coasted to a stop on River Road after a Delta police officer tried for nearly three kilometres to get the vehicle to pull over. The truck matched the description of a vehicle in an earlier 911 call. › see page 2
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