Straight Outta Crompton: We’re Going To Spend Your Money. You Can Tell Us How Or Not, Up To You!
Monday, March 12 5:30pm at the Whistler Conference Center the RMOW is having our first open house for the 2012 budget process. Our goal is to include the whole community in the process of shaping our community financial plan. Whistler has for a long time been engaged in the Whistler 2020 process which has provided opportunity for residents to have input on our community direction. We’d like to apply a similar kind of direct democracy to the budget process going forward. We want to ask questions and hear the answers Whistler provides. My great big hope is that you all come out! I want our demographic to be represented and our voices heard. Nothing against my dad and his buddies but without the rest of us we’ll get a very one-dimensional representation of the world. So hey WIA, put Monday 5pm at the Conference Center in your palm pilot!
You may or may not know Kevin Damaskie but since he is the RMOW guru of public engagement I thought an interview with him would be timely and interesting. Here it is my first Straight Outta Crompton interview:
JC: Who are you and why should I listen to you?
KD: My name is Kevin and I live in and love Whistler. Really, no one should listen to me. You should listen to your heart, particularly when it comes to the future of this great resort community we choose to call home. Right now, I am a small piece of a small, great team of Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) employees working on behalf of the Mayor and Council, and our citizens, to get people involved in work the RMOW does on the community’s behalf on a daily basis. Right now it’s all about the budget, silly. Don’t listen to me. I want to listen to you.
JC: How did you get involved in public engagement?
KD: I’m a writer, so any community I live in I’m personally, publically, professionally and practically engaged with, it is my nature. I moved to Whistler in 1992 sporting some post-adolescent acne, a wannabe ski-bum attitude, a mullet and a reporter job with the Whistler Question. My first story was about squatters living on BC Rail property along the Green River at the north end of the valley. I’ve engaged squatters, sign makers, senators, ski-bums, and every facet of this community in between. I grew up here and this place grew up around me as I tried to figure out what was actually happening here and why it worked. With three partners I launched Pique Newsmagazine in 1994 and quickly realized good public engagement in Read more
