Dawson Youth are Write Up North Winners

by Dan Davidson

As part of a continuing effort to promote literacy in Dawson City, several organizations got together in mid March for hold an evening devoted to learning. Lingo Bingo night was held at the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Community Hall on March 11 as a joint effort of the first nation’s educational branch, the Learning Disabilities Association of Yukon and Yukon Learn.

LDAY workers had set up a mirror writing experiment which demonstrated how a learning impaired individual might have problems with perceptual tasks.

Several high school students were on hand to get guests to try their hands at science experiment involving water tension and photography.

Sophia Marnik read a children's’ story for the younger set.

And, of course, there was food - a meal and lots of goodies.

In addition to all of this Steven Mead of Yukon Learn took advantage of the evening to announce that three Dawson writers had been winners in that organization’s “Write Up North” contest, which closed in January.

Teacher Joann Vriend took first prize in the adult category, from among the more than 50 entrants.

In the age 12-17 category Mary Fraughton took second place for her poetry contribution, “An Ode to the Toad”, while Elizabeth captured first place for her short story about a girl enjoying a winter day with her dogs.

Both girls read their work to the audience.

“As the summer goes by we’re hoping to produce an anthology of winners with some artwork by local artists,” Mead said.

“The judges were impressed by the creativity of all the entries.”

The evening closed with a rousing game of Lingo Bingo, which is just about what it sounds, a Bingo game with words in play instead of numbers.

Uffish Thoughts: Dawsonites Suffer from Current Events Whiplash

by Dan Davidson

A person could have gotten a serious case of whiplash trying to keep up with all the developments in Dawson City last week. In fact, I’m about to write a column with conclusions which may be completely overtaken by events by the time it sees the news stand, but it’s an exercise in putting events in context, so most of it should still be relevant by Tuesday when our local paper will appear in print.

By this time no one can have forgotten that Dawson City is about $4.2 million in debt. This is a number which, according to YTG appointed Supervisor André Carrel’s interview in the Trail Times on January 12, 2004, is 40 percent over the legal limit for municipal borrowing.

He neglected to mention that Dawson was prodded and permitted to exceed that limit by the territorial government of the day, but that often seems to get lost in the discussion.

In that same interview Carrel, who collected at least $40,000 ($800 a day, or $10,000 a month from October 3, 2003) for the initial four months work he put into helping the town sort out its financial future, took strong issue with the idea that Dawson would pay a full time mayor $50,000 a year, so it should come as no surprise that one of the outcomes of his report, delivered here on January 23, is that Mayor Glen Everitt is now half-time.

What did come as a surprise to nearly everyone was to discover in late February that Carrel was still on the job with an extended contract. He had announced at the meeting that his task was done and his contract was over at the end of January.

His contract and his appointment by order-in-council were two different things, of course, but when he told the crowd at the YOOP hall that he was holding the meeting when he was because his contract only ran until the end of January and he had to get his report finished, people could be pardoned for drawing the obvious conclusion.

Also during January the city issued a “Request for Proposals” (Sun, January 13, 2004) in which it stipulated that it wanted to see a variety of options for making changes to the way in which garbage is collected and disposed of in the town. It might or might not pick a contractor from that set of “sealed proposals” the ad said.

Mr. Carrel was aware of this process and said nothing about it until a month later. In January he said he was not interested in the picky details of running the town. His mandate was to make sure that $1.35 million could be accessed in case of a poor outcome in the town’s arbitration hearings with TSL Contracting. His actual demand was that $1.2 million be set aside for this process, but his report indicated that any award of damages from the city in excess of $1.3 million would be enough to trigger his recommendation that the council be replaced by a trustee.

When asked about this later on, Community Services Minister Glen Hart agreed that a bad ruling by the arbitrator against Dawson would probably be the trigger for that sort of a step. So when we learned early last week that the arbitrator’s report was much less that the worst-case $4 million that both Hart and Carrel had hypothesised, less even than the $1.35 million trigger, we assumed, as did every reporter working on the file, that this meant Dawson was out of the woods as far as trusteeships were concerned

Not so.

Carrel had filed his report and returned to Rossland, where he runs his consulting firm, assists in the running of several small towns, and seems to discuss Dawson’s situation freely at their meetings, as he did in Montrose in early October , shortly after he was hired, but before he received his letter of instruction (Rossland Record, October 9, 2003).

Despite saying repeatedly that he was not interested in any of the details of the administration of the financial plan, so long as nothing that council did coloured outside the lines that had been drawn in that document, Carrel was suddenly on the fax machine and e-mail in late February, demanding that council rescind a waste hauling contract award that had come out of the proposal process, an award which was within budget and featured a commercial fee schedule and planning process which have been endorsed by the Dawson City Chamber of Commerce. (See the back page of this paper for the city’s rationale and fee schedule, a document which was prepared early in the week, before the situation evolved.)

After two weeks of back and forth bickering, Carrel issued an ultimatum late in the second week of March, and is said to have recommended dissolution of the council on Monday, March 15. The YTG cabinet communications office will not confirm this, but it was what Mayor Everitt was told on March 19 while in Whitehorse.

This all came as quite a shock, since the word out of the capital over the previous two weeks had been that Carrel was being replaced as supervisor. Council had been given oral assurances of everything but the name of the replacement, who had already accepted the appointment, it was said. Everitt was to have received confirmation of this on Friday, the same day that he met with Hart to share the results of the arbitration award in a closed meeting.

Instead, as a kind of afterthought to the main meeting, Everitt was told that Carrel was still on the case. About a half-hour later, after Everitt had left the meeting, the city office received word that its bank accounts were frozen and all expenditures would have to be cleared with Carrel. Everitt wasn’t told.

This is almost, but not quite, a trusteeship, something that was only supposed to happen if the arbitrator’s award was bad, which it wasn’t. Is it any wonder that heads are spinning here this week?