Dawsonites to Help Russians with Municipal Government

by Dan Davidson

Mayor Glen Everitt and City Manager Scott Coulson may have had their business travel budgets gutted by recommendations from the Carrel Report, but they’re off to Russia on a ten day trip starting on February 4, and it’s not costing the City of Dawson a penny.

All the costs, including travel and loss of wages while they function as part of a federal assembled team of consultants in municipal government, are being absorbed by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.

The team will include another Canadian mayor and manager, plus one mayor from Alaska, a number of university professors and federal bureaucrats.

“There are two functions,” said Scott Coulson. “The first is to help create a circumpolar municipal association, and the second is to develop course guidelines for teaching new municipal employees and municipal governments over in Russia.”

Coulson finds it ironic that the City of Dawson, which has recently come under so much fire for the way it runs itself, should have been invited to have two members on the core six member panel.

Glen Everitt has been to Russia previously, as part of a junket sponsored and paid for by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and DIAND, to address municipal issues, partly as a result of his FCM activities. One of the spinoffs from the earlier trip has been the return visits of a number of Russian delegates to the Yukon to observe how things are done here.

Local democracy is a relatively new thing in Russia, which shook off its top-down, centralized Communist administration in 1991 and has since been struggling to remake itself as a democracy instead of a one-party state.

, “Russia is now developing a piece of legislation to govern municipalities,” Everitt explained. “This is a review of that project. There’s been panels created of political scientists, etc., and we’re supposed to represent the northern perspective of mayors.

“There’s three or four professors from different universities, They’re talking about educational opportunities in Canada - in the North - for people from these different circumpolar countries to come here.”

Everitt was originally asked to go just by himself, but insisted that Coulson should accompany him.

“I wasn’t prepared to do it without an administrative head there. Politicians can say that they’re going to do everything, but somebody has to be there to say it’s impossible.”

Everitt has done quite a bit of travelling in Canada on official business, but his trips out of Canada have been paid for by someone other than the town.

“Somebody had been told that I’d been to China, Hawaii, Thailand and all these different places a mayor,” he said, laughing at the thought.

New WECC boss struck music gold in Yukon

by Bartley Kives

Winnipeg Free Press

Monday, February 2nd, 2004

If you think Winnipeg's off the beaten path for concert tours, imagine life in Dawson, Yukon.

The historic gold-rush town, located 3,200 highway kilometres north of Vancouver, is not exactly a prime destination for music's biggest names.

Nevertheless, this Klondike community hosts a respectable folk and rock festival every

summer called the Dawson City Music Festival. It takes a good logistical mind to make the event successful -- and now that brain is coming to work in Winnipeg.

The next artistic director at the West End Cultural Centre will be Dominic Lloyd, a Yukon native who's spent the past five years running the Dawson City Music Festival.

He'll take over the creative reins at the inner-city music hall on March 8, filling the position left vacant when Chris Frayer moved over to Jazz Winnipeg.

Raised in Whitehorse, the Yukon capital, Lloyd went to university in Burnaby, B.C. and has also lived in England and France. He was a festival volunteer before he took over "the job that nobody wanted" in Dawson, a town of 1,800.

"It's a little different situation here, being a festival" as opposed to a venue like the West End Cultural Centre, says the 32-year-old, speaking over the phone from Dawson. "But I do have a lot of contacts across the West."

He has visited the West End Cultural Centre just once, during Prairie Music Week in 2002. He admits he knows little about Winnipeg beyond the fact the city has a vibrant arts scene and intends to get the lay of the land before he puts his personal stamp on WECC programming.

"I don't plan on walking in there and making drastic changes," he says.

He also may be the first arts administrator to move to Manitoba and find the climate easier to take. "It's -50 today, without the wind-chill," he said late last week, when it was -32 at Portage and Main.

"I've been to Winnipeg a half-dozen times, but never in the summer. I'm looking forward to that."

Hey, aren't we all?

(Forwarded to the Sun by John [The Archives Guy] Richthammer.)