Ian Scromeda

I'll start with my own house. I don't let my children walk on Carr's Landing Road. I asked the school district to move the bus stop to our driveway so they wouldn't have to. When I ride my bike, I take Barkley Road instead. I don't think I'm the only parent here who's done the same.

Carr's Landing Road is five kilometres of two lanes with no shoulders and nowhere safe to walk. What residents have asked for since 2002 is somewhere separated from the traffic to walk and ride, and a surface that holds up. In the 2025 survey the road's condition was the single most-raised item.

The engineers' answer to the walking-and-riding part is a separated pathway on the lake side, narrowing where the road narrows so it can fit through the tight stretches. Their 2022 review put a full rebuild at about $14 million in 2022 dollars. I'll promise you what I can actually get done, so here is where it stands: the design for the stretch between the two Commonage intersections is about half finished and carried forward from last year, and construction has no money in any year of the District's five-year financial plan. The previous plan had $3 million in it. That line came out. A pathway of this size needs money from Victoria and Ottawa, and I'd rather tell you that than promise it.

Here's what I can start on now. Get the signage, sightline and drainage fixes the engineers recommended in 2022 finished. Get the road surface into the District's repair budget, because it's what most of you raised. And push for the pathway to be built a section at a time, with money from Victoria and Ottawa and with new development paying its share, which is what residents said in 1993 and what the Sector Plan asked for in 2006.

And the ditches. Culverts along this road have been filling in for years, and the District has drifted from running a maintenance cycle to answering service requests one at a time. A resident filed a request for blocked culverts on a hill road in August 2025; thirteen months later, nothing has been done. I'd push to restore the ditch and culvert cycle and publish the schedule, so people can see when their stretch is due instead of filing a ticket and waiting. Clearing a culvert costs a fraction of repairing the washout that follows it.

We have one road in and one road out. Everybody here has lived through the last several fire seasons in this valley: the smoke, the alerts, the grab-and-go bag packed in August in case the order came. In 2023 the alert reached Bond, Camp, Davidson and Cemetery Roads. A month ago the Bald Range fire went through Faulder, west of Summerland, with roads cut off and people trapped. Almost every home there was lost, and a woman died trying to get out. And the District's own case for the water project says our infrastructure doesn't meet adequate fire protection standards. That is the thing I worry about most, and when this ward was surveyed last year it was rated the most important thing for us to invest in.

I'll push to get the fire flows fixed, meaning the water our hydrants can actually deliver. Not eventually, but with a date, a cost and a funding plan, starting with the areas that can't meet the standard at all. That is a safety problem before it is a water problem, and it has been on the record here since 2006.

I'll make sure every household in Carr's Landing knows its evacuation zone and its route before next fire season. The plans exist, and the District's own address lookup doesn't find every property yet. That gap can be closed this year for almost nothing, and I'm not waiting for an election to start on it.

And I'll keep pressing on the single road. One way out is a risk you can't plan around, and I want it front of mind in every decision made about this ward: the road, the growth and the water alike.

I'll push for FireSmart coverage across the whole ward. The community association and the Fire Department are running a Neighbourhood Champions pilot. I want every part of Carr's Landing covered by it, and wildfire readiness reported to council every spring, before the season starts.

Access to the lake is half the reason people are here, and protecting it was rated very important by more than half of us in last year's survey. My starting point is simple: hold on to the public access we already own, before spending anything on new access.

Most people don't know how much that is. The 2006 Sector Plan counted eleven public road-ends running down to Okanagan Lake, and asked the District to take them on, improve and sign them, and keep them public. I'll push to see that done: signed so people can find them, kept clear and usable, and, if any is ever closed, the public's right of access to the water written onto the title, the way council did on Cemetery Road in 2025. Access we already own is the cheapest access we will ever get.

Coral Beach carries most of the load, and parking and congestion there came up again in 2025. It's an honest problem: there's a launch and a beach, and effectively nowhere to park, and nothing at all for a truck and trailer, so everyone ends up on the road. On a summer weekend there are far more boats trying to use that one launch than it was ever built for, and it shows.

What would take the pressure off is somewhere else to launch. The 2006 Sector Plan already asked the District to look at another Okanagan Lake launch site for motorized and non-motorized craft. Twenty years on it's still the answer, and it's the one I'd push for, along with sorting out what happens on the road in the meantime.

The servicing strategy is on hold, and the costs are worth stating plainly. The District puts extending the public system at $20 to $25 million, which works out to roughly $55,000 to $70,000 a property, and its own figures note that does not include borrowing cost. The alternatives are not cheaper. Upgrading the Coral Beach system on its own is estimated at $80,000 to $100,000 a property, and the engineering estimate for Eastside alone works out to about $127,000 a lot. Those are the real numbers, and I'll keep them in front of everyone who has to decide.

In the meantime, Eastside customers here were put on a boil-water notice in June 2023 for a failed distribution system and excessive turbidity, on a private utility, 45 years old, that the Province has been operating since 1998. I'll keep that in front of the Province and Interior Health until it's fixed.

Outside Coral Beach the District has limited authority here, and the Eastside system is run by the Province, so this is a job of pushing Victoria more than voting at council. The District's own advice to residents is to press our MP and MLA for funding. That's work I'd do every month, numbers in hand, not just when a deadline shows up.

Two questions I'd want answered before anything goes ahead. The water would come from Beaver Lake, which the District acknowledges runs high in colour and turbidity through the summer. And in 2024 the Lake Country Farmers' Institute asked whether the system would reduce the irrigation water available to agriculture during the growing season. That question is still sitting on the District's page without an answer. In a ward built on orchards, it deserves one. See About my job for where I'd have to step back.

The municipal, policing and fire share of your tax bill went up 17.05% in 2023, 9.52% in 2024, 6.45% in 2025 and 5.75% this year, or roughly 44% compounded. That share isn't the whole bill, either. The District also collects school tax and a number of other levies on behalf of other governments, and those sit on top of it.

Most of the 2023 jump was not a spending decision. Lake Country passed 15,000 residents, which moved our share of RCMP costs from 70% to 90% and changed the formula used to calculate it. Policing went from $2.52 million in 2022 to $3.79 million in 2023. At 90% we also carry the full cost of the detachment building, the cells and the support staff, so a new police building is a bill already on its way.

Most of that bill is policing, fire and contracts, and I'll be straight with you about what's movable and what isn't. I've built and run budgets for a living. What I will do is ask what a thing costs and what we give up to pay for it, before I vote. And on anything that makes a real difference to what this ward pays, I'll bring it to you first: explain it in plain language, hear what you think while there is still time for it to matter, and take that into the room with me. You will always know why I voted the way I did, and you will always have been asked first.