Thursday, March 28, 2019 | Your community newspaper since 1916
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Getting air Ethan Bach, 12, does a tail whip up a quarter pipe on Wednesday at the Rotary Skatepark. Even with snow left in the park kids are able to find enough dry area to skate and ride.
Coroner releases map of unidentified human remains Citizen staff
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Williams Lake-based Adventure Charter and Rentals is looking to bring regular bus service between Prince George and Surrey.
Bus company aims to launch Prince George-Surrey service Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca A Williams Lake bus company is seeking the Passenger Transportation Board’s permission to provide a twice-a-week service between Prince George and Surrey. If all works out, Adventure Charter and Rentals will have it up and running by early June, operations manager Randy Gertzen said Wednesday, filling a void created when Greyhound Canada withdrew from Western Canada in October 2018. The company submitted an application to the PTB in February. By then, an attempt by another venture, Merritt Shuttle Bus Ltd., to get a similar service on the road was looking doubtful and the last of its deadline extensions expired in early March. In contrast, Adventure Charters
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The plan is to provide a twiceweekly service that takes clients to the Skytrain station in Surrey... has years of experience in the business. It provides a daily run to the Mount Polley mine and a charter service for schools, teams, First Nations and other groups. “We do any kind of charter service that you require,” Gertzen said. “If you want to go from here to Seattle, to Edmonton, to wherever you want to go, we are licenced to go anywhere in B.C. or the States.” Moreover, Gertzen said the company used to do emergency runs for Greyhound.
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“So we got a pretty good idea of what they did and how they did it,” he said. The plan is to provide a twiceweekly service that takes clients to the Skytrain station in Surrey and scheduled to connect with the BC Bus North service in Prince George, with 11 stops in between those two. The application also calls for a second twice-a-week service between Williams Lake and Kamloops. On the Prince George-Surrey route, it will run a 36-passenger bus, significantly smaller than the buses Greyhound used. Hiring additional drivers, setting an exact schedule and establishing a method to book rides will be among the next steps pending approval of a licence by the PTB. Details will be posted on the company website, www.adventurecharters.ca.
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The BC Coroners Service has launched a new interactive tool displaying key information on active unidentified human remains cases in British Columbia, with an aim to generate new leads that will assist in closing these investigations. The unidentified human remains (UHR) interactive viewer is a web-mapping application containing spatial, temporal and statistical information on every active, unsolved investigation in the province. There are currently just under 200 unsolved and active cases involving unidentified human remains in B.C. Most of these involve cold cases, with the earliest dating back to 1953. The map shows two such spots in the Prince George area – one for the body of a man, 40-60 years, found in the Pidherny area in October 2013 and another for a man, 30 to 55 years old, found southeast of the city. The UHR interactive viewer
was developed by Ian Charlton, a spatial information analyst with the B.C. Coroners Service’s Special Investigations Unit. It is hosted on B.C.’s map hub and can be found at bit. ly/2MWfIui. The viewer provides a visual overview of the approximate location where the remains were found, case numbers for contact purposes and a summary of the key information related to each unresolved case in B.C. “By reaching out and engaging members of the public with the launch of this innovative tool, it’s our hope to gain new investigative leads that will lead to the identification of these unidentified individuals and bring closure to their families,” said chief coroner Lisa Lapointe. Anyone with information or questions about any of the investigations displayed on the UHR interactive viewer should contact the Special Investigations Unit using the case number provided in the viewer at BCCS.SIU@gov. bc.ca.
City gets $11.3M for infrastructure The city will have an additional $11.3 million to spend on infrastructure. Of that, $8.1 million will come from the provincial government through its $100-million northern capital and planning grant program while $3.2 comes as a result of a doubling of the share the city will get from the federal government’s excise tax on gasoline. Both amounts will be added to the budget city council approved last month and put into reserves for the time being. No specific projects have been earmarked for the money. The province announced its grant on Tuesday and the fed-
eral contribution was part of the budget unveiled last week. Both Mayor Lyn Hall and Coun. Garth Frizzell, the city’s representative at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, welcomed the money. “Prince George, like local governments across Canada, is grappling with the costs associated with aging infrastructure,” Hall said. “Roads, bridges, above and below ground infrastructure, and our recreational facilities, are all aging and in need of maintenance and enhancement.” Also on the province’s receiving end, Fraser-Fort George Regional District will get $4.2 million, Mackenzie will get $4.7 million, Valemount $2.9 million and McBride $2.4 million.
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