FALSE ALARM BYLAW FINALLY FIXED Owners will receive escalating fines for wasting emergency services time BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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four-year-old bylaw designed to crack down on false alarms that was all bark and no bite now has teeth. City council enacted the false
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At Tuesday’s meeting, city council approved a “phased-in approach” to sending out invoices for false alarms, the first step of which will involve a public information campaign for at least a month, followed by fines being issued.
to confirm police or fire are actually required. But there was a glitch. The city’s computer system couldn’t hook up with the RCMP’s, meaning invoicing the escalating charges, which start at $100 and rise to $400, weren’t charged.
alarm bylaw in 2011 at the request of the RCMP as a way to reduce unnecessary emergency service calls for alarms. The bylaw was designed to force alarm monitoring companies to try to contact a property owner prior to calling emergency services in order
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THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2015
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UFV golf coach finds himself elf on world stage
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Recognize yourself? Just plug in your postal code and discover if your liftestyle is living up to your address BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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@peejayaitch
ting tattoos to commemorate it all. Sound pretty specific? They also have an average household income of $115,392, low ethnic diversity, and folks like them make up 2.24 per cent of the Canadian population. That’s according to marketing company Environics Analytics that has created an algorithm based on Statistics Canada data to identify 68 lifestyle types in the country
by postal code. Type your postal code into the system and out churns a label: Satellite Burbs or Traditional Town Living or Wide Open Spaces, for example. For Thomas and her family who live in the Chilliwack area west of Broadway, east of Young and south of Chilliwack Central roads, the label is Trucks & Trades. And Thomas found it a “little creepy” how accurately the snapshot nailed her family and her neighbourhood. “[It] guessed our income accurately, that we most likely have a truck, boat, a camping trailer, own our home, { See LIFESTYLES, page A7 }
Residents may have found way to stop project BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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ixty residents have now filed a lawsuit against the City of Chilliwack to try to stop the project to raise the Young Road dike by one metre. The move comes a month after the group of mostly Young Road residents hired a lawyer to threaten a $2.8 million lawsuit if the city went ahead with the project. “We believe our clients have a strong case to argue, if the City proceeds with this ill-founded plan, to claim all of their damages relating to injurious affection, as well as direct physical damage, as a result of this proposed work on Young Road,” said a letter sent to the city. For financial reasons, however, the Notice of Civil Claim filed in BC Supreme Court on April 10 was done without a lawyer. A trial, therefore, is unlikely meaning the suit will serve as little more than a further threat to the municipality. Those who led the charge against the project think the more likely route to stop the project might be through the provincial government. { See DIKE, page A3 }
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he streets and driveways near Jocelyn Thomas’s Chilliwack home are full of pickup trucks, RVs and boats on trailers. The houses are mostly B.C. boxes, full of young and middle-aged families with kids under 15. The homeowners are hardworking skilled tradespeople and blue-collar labourers who have built a comfortable lifestyle in the suburbs. They work hard and they play hard: fishing, hunting, playing hockey, watching mixed martial arts and get-
PAUL J. HENDERSON
Lawsuit plugs up dike work
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