Rotary Club of Nanaimo March 13, 2020 (Mar 12, 2020)

Egon Holzwarth, Yvan Gosselin, Wayne Anderson, Ian Williams and John Heisterman (not pictured) were honoured with Paul Harris Awards from Susan Gerrard for their service to the club and community.

Meeting Notes

Posted by John Shillabeer

President Janeane welcomed everyone and was followed by the members singing a particularly enthusiastic version of the National Anthem.

Yvan Gosselin gave the inspiration, urging us to enjoy Rotary, avoid the corona virus and volunteer for the book sale.

Guests

Laurie Bienert introduced “Fish” Fisher (District Youth Chair) and Craig Gillis (Past District Governor), both from the Campbell River Daybreak Club. Mikel Knutsson introduced Doug Jones from the Canmore, Alberta club. Jason Bradley introduced Paul Geneau from Nanaimo North Club. Paul is also district member for youth exchange.

Jason went on to introduce his daughter Grace, who was a Rotary exchange student in Japan 2018-19, together with current Japan-bound exchange student Maggie Maclachlan.

Member Anniversaries

It was particularly fitting that on International Women’s Day we should celebrate that President Janeane and Lucie G

osselin joined the Club on March 6th, 28 years ago and were among the small group of first female club members.

We also celebrated Frank Shoemaker’s 22 years of Rotary membership. Congratulations to all three veteran members!

Rotary Flashback Project

This week’s flashback was the Rotary Field House at 850, 3^rd Street in Nanaimo. All the Rotary Clubs of Nanaimo, led by Oceanside, donated to the building fund along with the City of Nanaimo and others. This beautiful building was opened in 2008.

Announcements

Janeane announced that tickets for the Club's 100^th Anniversary gala dinner on may 2nd will be on sale shortly. Also the upcoming RYLA event has been cancelled on account of concerns about the corona virus.

Brent Stetar appealed for more people to sign up and volunteer for the book sale which starts on March 27th.

Rebecca Taylor gave notice of a forthcoming motion to donate $25,000 to Nanaimo Foodshare for the purchase of a new commercial scale refrigerator. The project is recommended by the Community Partnerships Committee and has been approved by the Board of Directors and the Grants Committee. The grant will be issued from surplus funds.

Laurie Bienert reminded members of the upcoming pub night on St Patrick’s Day, March 17th at SimonHolt. Wear green, drink green beer, play games and have fun!

Paul Harris Presentations

Lucie Gosselin, chair of the Foundation Committee, presented Paul Harris pins to:

Brenda Grice, Dave Hammond, Carey McIvor, Egon Holzwarth and Norm Myden (8th PHF)
Yvan Gosselin (6th PHF)
Kathy Smith, Lynne Pankratz and Ed Borisenko (3rd PHF)
Wahid Ali (1st PHF)

Susan Gerrard resigned from the Club a few months ago and donated her Paul Harris awards to John Heisterman, Wayne Anderson, Ian Williams, Egon Holzwarth and Yvan Gosselin in recognition of their past and ongoing contributions to Club service activities.

Lucie said that we have not yet reached our target for Polio Plus and urged Members to dig deep for this worthwhile cause.

Sergeant at Arms

Sgt Dave Hammond kicked off by briefly questioning and answering himself about Leap Day.

Happy and Sad Bucks

Paul Geneau was happy to offer tickets at $25 each for the North Club’s Craft Beer Trail.

Yvan Gosselin was happy to be back home and to thank Jason Bradley for all the good work he does with youth.

Rebecca Taylor was sad to announce that the previously scheduled “Shine” festival has been postponed until September 26th.

Mikel Knutsson was happy that Thrifty’s had raised over $18,000 during Christmas for the Food Bank.

Craig Gillis was happy to tell us about the District 5020 Polio Plus Society. You can join by promising to donate $100 USD per year until the disease is eradicated.

The Draw

Doug Cowling was the lucky winner.

President Janeane then closed the meeting and congratulated everyone for a packed, high energy and enjoyable session.

Dale Lindsay, City of Nanaimo, General Manager of Development Services

Dale is a longtime employee with the City, and has been in Nanaimo Since 1994. He was kind enough to talk to us about recent development of new housing and commercial construction in our City, which has been significant in the last year!

Although the City of Nanaimo has been in a growth phase, the number of single family homes being built here has declined since 2016, but the key difference is that 75% those being built now include rental suites. This is part of the City’s strategy to increase rental housing available, while maintaining quality controls and avoiding reliance on large scale developments to increase available rentals. Nanaimo is led by residential development, and we spend more on residential development than any other type of development. This means more expensive homes are being built here. We still have extremely low vacancy rates in Nanaimo, at 2.5% in 2018, and dropped even further in 2019.

Who’s buying in Nanaimo? 47% of new home buyers here are new to Nanaimo, and they are coming from all over BC and the rest of Canada. Nanaimo is attracting more people than any other place on the island. Another intriguing change is the type of subdivision that is happening here. Many of us have seen larger “estate-style” lots that are being redeveloped as two or three single family homes, and fewer large developments of 20, 30, or more lots being developed by larger developers. These smaller subdivisions offer buyouts for developers to avoid developing public spaces, and therefore many choose to pay a fee, rather than develop parks and infrastructure, which is typically already in place in these smaller developments.

What about resources, such as water, which is always on the minds of island dwellers? In fact, our water consumption has decreased significantly, so that we now use approximately the same amount of water that we used when we were at only two thirds of the current population.

Where are people building? It’s all over the city. No longer concentrated in the north end, investment is across the city, in many of our town centre areas. And much of it is apartments, condominiums, and combination properties that include multi-use spaces. These spaces reflect investor’s enthusiasm for downtown areas and a longer, broader vision of Nanaimo. These new spaces will greet visitors as they enter key gateway neighbourhoods in the city, showing that our City has reached a new level in national and international tourism and cultural development.

Some interesting highlights include things like 2 lanes of cycle tracks on Front Street downtown, Metral Drive’s “complete streets” plan including foot and cycle traffic lanes, a $6M investment to improve the trail up to Woodgrove Centre, a new fire hall downtown, a skateboard park in Harewood, and then of course the Rotary Centennial park project, which will break ground this year. Other coordinated projects are taking place at Serauxmen park (new lighting), a new playground at Maffeo Sutton park, and upgrades at the Loudon boathouse in cooperation with Nanaimo North Rotary club.

You can register online to get updates about local development, by clicking to: https://www.nanaimo.ca/WhatsBuilding

Dave Hammond presented Dale with a handmade pen to thank him for being our guest speaker today.