Penticton agriculture committee fails

Penticton says it needs nine people to form an agriculture committee, and not enough applicants stepped forward during a brief application window this spring.

The lack of candidates made it impossible to constitute a functional committee, says Shane Mills, the city’s senior communications advisor (the exact number of applicants wasn’t immediately available).

The idea of reviving the committee, one of 33 in the province prior to its disbandment last year, was therefore shelved.

Penticton’s previous committee was terminated under former mayor John Vassilaki, who lost to Julius Bloomfield in last fall’s civic elections.

“I had high hopes when Julius [Bloomfield] was elected that it would be started again,” said orchardist Annelise Simonsen, who sat on the previous committee.

She received an invitation to apply for the new committee this spring less than two weeks’ prior to the application deadline of March 24. Her application was never acknowledged.

Simonsen wonders why the city didn’t ask previous committee members to suggest additional members.

“I could have recommended many people,” she says. “In fact, that’s how I became part of the committee, maybe two years ago. They were having a hard time filling the positions so they reached out to farmers and different people within the city.”

While committee work is time-consuming both in terms of staff resources and the volunteer hours members contribute, she noted that the previous committee met infrequently. This resulted in a backlog of work and elongated approval times for projects. Some items when she joined had been awaiting the committee’s consideration for nine months and more.

A shortage of planning staff to prepare materials and brief the committee is also a consideration.

“They probably have good reason not to want to,” Simonsen says of the city’s decision to not make greater efforts to convene an agricultural advisory committee. “I don’t think that’s a good enough reason not to.”

Penticton isn’t the only municipality to scale back its civic committees. Surrey drew fire in 2021 for a streamlining of civic committees that saw its Agricultural and Food Policy Committee rolled into an Agriculture, Environment and Investment Committee. The move was subsequently reversed.