Crafty political move or big idea?
It’s finally here: election season. At least that’s the conclusion skeptics may have drawn when they saw the notice of motion brought forward by Max Picton at last week’s Penticton city council meeting.
Picton and his mates unanimously approved the motion directing city staff to come up with some type of incentive program to increase the stock of energy efficient, ecofriendly housing in the community.
In theory, building houses with things like solar panels and exceptionally high insulation values will cut down on the cost of living for their owners while also helping the environment at large.
“I think if we can incentivize our development community to build a higher quality house, it’s going to make it more affordable for our community to live, it’s going to make our community more desirable for people to live there,” Picton explained to those at the meeting.
“And for the minimal break that the developer would get on doing this, I think the long-term overall benefit would outweigh that for our taxpayers.”
Such incentive programs are usually handled by utility companies and senior levels of government in the form of rebates or tax breaks, so it will be interesting to see what city staff comes up with.
More interesting will be the reaction in the community to Picton’s proposal. From a political perspective, it’s pretty clever.
Developers everywhere are a political force to be reckoned with, and would surely be pleased with anything that will help their bottom lines.
The proposal also targets those with an environmental bent, typically the younger crowd, which Picton courted in his first run at office in 2014.
So he really killed two birds with one stone there – and a rare two doubleplay at that, since developers and environmentalists usually go together like Vees and Vipers fans.
It’s possible, of course, that Picton wasn’t thinking about the election campaign ahead and was rather just doing his job as a city councillor and dreaming up ways to make the community better.
The jury is still out on whether giving developers more incentives will do that – and especially whether it’s the city’s job to get involved in what is clearly the realm of senior governments – but good on him for getting the conversation started.
Municipal elections are just under seven months away now.
It’s unlikely anyone’s gloves will come off until the fall, when sunsoaked voters have returned to their regularly scheduled programming, but there’s no time like the present to start talking about big ideas.