Education: Hammond students tudents turn the lights off. 11
C Community: Making a difference in Nepal. 3
Sports Sports: Throwe Throwers f made from ‘dynam ‘dynamite.’ 33
Fr i d ay, J u n e 2 6 , 2 0 1 5 · mapleridgenews.com · est. 1978 · (office) 604-467-1122 · (del iver y) 6 0 4 - 4 6 6 - 6 3 9 7
Top city wages climb 25 per cent Increase of $3.5 million over last year By Phil M elnyc h u k pmelnychuk@mapleridgenews.com
While taxes keep climbing, so do salaries at Maple Ridge city hall. According to 2014’s financial statement, Maple Ridge’s total wage tab for those above the $75,000-a-year threshold jumped to $17,417,541. That’s an increase of $3,473,074 from the previous year, a 25-percent jump. “That’s a lot,” said Mayor Nicole Read. Council is reviewing the entire financial plan and will start this summer by determining what areas it wants to focus on when budget discussions start in the fall, Read said. See Pay, 8
Tim Fitzgerald/THE NEWS
Cooling off Isabel Galindo cools off at the Albion spray park Wednesday. Temperatures are expected to hit 32 C Saturday in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows.
Steps to save resting place Settler’s family cemetery has heritage
the Robertson Family Cemetery be formally recognized as a burial place. Local historian Fred Braches, though, has heard it all before. He’s been trying for 15 years to have the cemetery protected. It’s a settler’s cemetery, he explains. “Of which we have none.” It hold the remains of the first European arrivals to this area. “This is one of the few cemeteries that we have of a settler’s family. These people go back to the
B y P h i l M e l nychuk pmelnychuk@mapleridgenews.com
Tim Fitzgerald/THE NEWS
Fred Braches has been trying to protect the cemetery for 15 years.
A little-known resting place in the woods of Whonnock could be formally recognized as a heritage cemetery, if the numbers work. Maple Ridge council agreed on Tuesday to have the heritage commission investigate the costs and steps needed to ensure that
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1860s.” The cemetery is located just behind another property on Byrnes Road, just off Lougheed Highway, and was named after Robert Robertson, from Scotland, who arrived in Whonnock, in east Maple Ridge, in about 1860. Ten Robertson family members are believed to be buried there, including Robert, who may have been the last, in 1912. The Robertson family was one of the early mixed marriages in B.C. Robert married Tselatsete-
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nate, a Sto:lo woman from Nicomen Island. She, too, is buried there after dying of tuberculosis in about 1886. However, the property has no headstones or grave markers because it was a family burial ground. That doesn’t matter, says Braches. “You don’t keep it because of the headstones. You keep it because of the people buried there.” It’s about respect, he added. See Cemetery, 9
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