Islands Trust leadership last week signed off on an expansion of Trust Council-initiated efforts to curtail a long-running policy of placing public notices in local newspapers, this time approving a bylaw that would require staff “publish” notifications related to Galiano Island only on Facebook and the Trust’s own website.
With motions passed by the Trust’s Executive Committee (EC) at its meeting Wednesday, Oct. 1, Galiano Island’s Local Trust Committee (LTC) will be joining three others — Mayne, Saturna and North Pender islands — who have agreed to adopt Trust Council’s “model” public notice bylaw.
Islands Trust staff promoted the model bylaw earlier this year as a money-saving effort to reduce administrative processes and costs by eliminating the need to advertise in print newspapers — including the Gulf Islands Driftwood. The Islands Trust Council agreed, and in June approved a policy that recommended individual LTCs instead use social media and the islandstrust.bc.ca website.
The Driftwood has run public notices related to the Islands Trust since May 1974, when it printed the full text of the then-new Islands Trust Act. Public notices appear both in print and in the newspaper’s digital edition.
Not all LTCs have adopted the model bylaw without changes. In August, Salt Spring Island’s LTC notably kept the “status quo” and islanders there will continue to see local notices published in the Driftwood — although trustees indicated last week there was nothing permanent about that arrangement.
“I think it’s important for all the Local Trust Committees to be looking at the best ways to communicate all the time,” said EC chair and Salt Spring Island trustee Laura Patrick Oct. 1, “because it is a moving target as things change.”
Galiano Island trustee Ben Mabberley spoke to his view of the shifting landscape at that island’s LTC meeting Sept. 9, saying he felt Facebook and the Islands Trust website were sufficient as newspapers were a “dying industry.”
Going forward, it was not immediately clear what savings islanders might see from the change. Historically, according to Driftwood records, the Islands Trust’s newspaper notices have mostly supported its efforts to inform the public about development permits and rezoning. It spends roughly $7,000 on public notifications in that newspaper each year for notices related to Salt Spring Island, according to a staff report, and some $9,000 spread among notices for all the other Gulf Islands.
That stands against a backdrop of nearly $450,000 spent on employee time processing development permits alone, according to a staff analysis this year. Roughly 90 per cent of those costs are borne by taxpayers, rather than the applicants themselves. A trustee-prompted initiative to review whether application fees should be adjusted to recover more of those costs remains incomplete.
At the Oct. 1 meeting the EC also endorsed a proposal to increase the Islands Trust’s Information Services spending by $56,400, within a budget including a new line item for $8,000 in costs “required to maintain the website throughout the year” and a $26,000 server upgrade, replacing equipment coming to its “end of life,” according to a staff report.
The Islands Trust’s approved budget envisions nearly $11.2 million in spending.