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No Dutch treat, city pulls pin on Walas
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BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
C BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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communities east of Surrey. “There is no plan to remove the Supreme court rooms from Chilliwack,” Assistant Deputy Minister of Justice Kevin Jardine confirmed to the Times in an emailed statement Tuesday. Back in 2013, the government provided a $600,000 grant to five municipalities, Surrey, Langley (city), Langley (township), Abbotsford and Chilliwack, to fund a long-term expansion plan for courtrooms for Lower Fraser Valley communities. What emerged on Feb. 3, 2014 was a report that concluded, among other things, that “Supreme Court facilities in the [Lower Fraser Valley]
should be located to best serve Surrey, Abbotsford, Langley and Chilliwack in that order.” The report, entitled the Lower Fraser Valley Regional Plan: Court Capacity Expansion Project, also said “there are operational advantages to having the majority of Supreme Court activity in a centralized location. The most appropriate location would be at Abbotsford or Langley, as those locations are closest to where the majority of demand originates.” In a Ministry of Justice press release that accompanied the report, one long-term recommendation was “expansion of Chilliwack’s
courthouse by two Provincial courtrooms.” That “expansion,” some said, was carefully worded and actually meant two provincial courtrooms would be added only because of the elimination of two Supreme courtrooms. The report said that a Supreme Court “presence,” would be retained in Chilliwack. The plan was for a court registry only. Both Chilliwack-Hope MLA Laurie Throness and the Ministry of Justice confirmed this was the original plan but things changed. “The [plan] was based on demographic and court demand analysis over the next 20 years,” Jardine said. “That analysis resulted in the recommendation for construction of a new courthouse in Abbotsford and the subsequent transfer of the { See SUPREME, page A17 }
{ See WALAS, page A18 }
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ingering concerns in political and justice circles about the possible loss of the Supreme Court in Chilliwack should be quelled this week with word that the BC Liberal government will keep the high court in town after all. For close to a year—and after recommendations in a report about court capacity expansion in the region—some feared the Ministry of Justice planned to close the two Supreme Courtrooms in Chilliwack moving them to a proposed expanded courthouse in Abbotsford. Currently there are three provincial courtrooms and two BC Supreme Court rooms in Chilliwack—the only Supreme Court rooms in the Fraser Valley serving
Ministry confirms original plans to move high court have changed
hilliwack’s brief experiment with a Dutch consulting firm to help fix the downtown is over. Walas Concepts was hired by Chilliwack Economic Partners Corporation (CEPCO) in May 2014, but just six months into the three-year initiative, the relationship was terminated. CEPCO president Brian Coombes confirmed Thursday that the last day for Walas Concepts in its downtown office was Jan. 16. “In the end, some of the recommendations [Walas made] were planning recommendations and we don’t need to retain an outside consulting firm to do that,” Coombes told the Times last Thursday. “We have a strong planning department at city hall and we just don’t need to have more planners as consultants. That’s not a knock on them.” The relationship with Walas began in 2013—incidentally, before Coombes took over as CEPCO president—when CEPCO identified the Dutch consulting firm to revitalize Chilliwack’s downtown core, something Walas has had success with in Europe. The firm was hired in May 2014 for a thee-year contract with a budget for the first year of $195,000. Of that, $65,000 was for a full-time CEPCO staff
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