The idea of building a year-round ski resort in the East Kootenay appears to have truly been too large for life.
The B.C. government tabled legislation last week to dissolve the Mountain Resort Municipality of Jumbo Glacier. It’s had a mayor, council and senior staff for eight years, but no residents, no buildings and no services.
Jerry Wilkie is a director with the Regional District of East Kootenay, which borders on the municipality, who says this outcome was “inevitable.”
“I’ve always thought it was a process that was led by a dream, which was, quite frankly socioeconomic folly. And so I was quite pleased to see the whole thing terminated.”
The area once proposed for a year-round ski hill is now an Indigenous conservation area.
“For a large number of people who were staunchly opposed to the project, we look forward to the land being conserved, which was the whole nature of the opposition to the project in the first place. That land is, really, a wonderful wildland, and it never should’ve been proposed for development in the first place,” Wilkie says.
The mayor of Jumbo Glacier, Greg Deck, who was the first mayor of nearby Radium Hot Springs from 1991 to 2008, told NL News he didn’t have further comment about the B.C. government tabling legislation to dissolve Jumbo.
“It’s really only a tidying up of a decision made long ago now,” Deck says.
The B.C. government had stated in January of 2020 that it would be moving to dissolve Jumbo Glacier.
The current mayor of Radium, Clara Reinhardt, says it’s a relief that the process is now over. She says she didn’t have strong feelings of the project one way or the other, but says the process dragged out for far too many years.
“My first response is relief. It has been going on for decades. A series of governments mismanaged the file, and there’s enough blame, if you will, to go around to every party, so it’s not any one party that kind of owned that. The proponent was very tenacious, and everytime they changed the rules he followed through and committed to it.”
Reinhardt says the proponent acted in good faith to try and meet changing environmental standards, before its environmental certificate was cancelled in 2015.
“I know previous councils were strongly in favour, they thought there would be strong economic components to it. The different tourism, that Radium would benefit from that. And over the years, I’m not sure that was still a strong case. But we’ll never know because this chapter is now closing.”