I have lived in Surrey for many, many years.
In 1965 Reeve R.J. Harvey had a council of 10 to help him run the municipality.
Today we have a mayor and eight councillors, plus a couple of managers, city clerks, deputies and assistants. And if you hadn’t noticed, the population of Surrey has mushroomed, and there has been a building boom which has eaten up most of the spaces that were here when I arrived.
Have you ever tried to contact a councillor about something in your area – if indeed you know where you live? I tell people I live in Newton – but I have to vote as a Port Kells resident, and the newspapers in the box on my block are the Peace Arch News and the Cloverdale Reporter.
We are such a large city, wouldn’t it be sensible to get back to something like the old ward system, where one councillor represented one area, and we redesigned our maps and knew who to talk with about issues in our area?
One councillor I finally nailed down said there were as many as 5,000 emails coming in – no wonder I was ignored. With our city centre moving to the Whalley area in the next few years – what better time to do a reorganizing of the electoral boundaries and to getting a few more councillors on board?
Sheila Gair
Surrey