Good gadget Why. a Terrace man is happy he’s hooked up to this pizmo\COMMUNITY B1 Looking for students A Thornhill daycare ~ reopens its doors on Fridays with hopes of staying afloat\NEWS A3 iSports shots Take a look at some of | the sports highlights of ; the Skeena Valley Fall | Fair\SPORTS BS $1.00 pLus 7¢ GST ($1.10 plus 8¢ GST outside of the Terrace area) i THECHY OF | _ TERRACE | By JEFF NAGEL THE CITY of Terrace slapped liens on trucks, forklifts and other mobile equipment at New Skeena Forest Pro- ducts’ Terrace sawmill on Friday. The Sept. 5 legal move via affixing of legal notices on the equipment, blocks the company from selling off the vehicles and preserves some chance of recovering unpaid property taxes, mayor Jack Talstra said. “We felt as a precautionary step we should do this at this time,” he said. New Skeena owes Terrace $2.4 million, city officials say. That includes $1.8 million in unpaid property taxes for the past two years, plus another $600,000 for older unpaid taxes that became part of a long-term __www.terracestandard.cot half ago when the operations emerged from bankruptcy protection, The city's action comes on the eve of a Sept. 15 deadline set by Prince Rupert for New Skeena to assemble the rest of its financing or Rupert would withdraw its own offer to inject $20 million. That deadline may be extended one month and Talstra said any extension makes this an opportune time to se- cure equipment against city taxes. Talstra said New Skeena is trying to sell some surplus equipment from its Prince Rupert pulp mill’s B line production facility and also sold some equipment from its Carnaby mill as part of its efforts to raise startup mon- ey. might try to sell some equipment and assets in Terrace as well,” Talstra said. “You don’t want to be in a position where you're the last one to know and the equipment is already gone.” New Hazelion took similar action at the Carnaby mill earlier this year. New Skeena vice-president Don Stuart said the company hopes to talk to Terrace officials and try to resolve the issue. When the same thing happened in New Hazelton, he said, New Skeena met officials there and agreed to notify them in advance of any sales and that all proceeds would go to the town to pay down back taxes. “TJ don’t think the stickering is a Wednesday, September 10, 2003 _ | City slaps liens on Skeena assets said. The situation is different in Terrace, he added. Unlike Carnaby, he said, there is no equipment in Terrace that New Skee- . na considers surplus to its future needs here. He said the issue isn’t a major one, but comes at a particularly delicate time as in the pursuit of financing. “It’s an optics issue,” Stuart said. “When you’re talking to investors it's the kind of noise that’s not helpful at all in discussions with investors,” “We think we're making good progress,” he added. Talstra called the decision a bal- ancing act. “You don't want to impede the company’s ability to start operat- said. “At the same time you don't want to see the company leaving town and bills being left behind including our tax bill.” a The liens don’t stop the company from using the equipment. “We've done the gentlest of things,” Talstra said. “We haven’t im- peded their day-to-day operations.” City administrator Ron Poole said he fears much equipment has already been moved over the past year. The appearance Friday by bailiffs Stickering the equipment triggered fears among laid-off workers that the last of their profit-sharing cheques might not be issued that day. The $1,250 cheques did go out as sched- uled. (For more on that story, please repayment plan struck a year and a = Seasonal treat Jack Cook Ecole francophone elementaire students Brandon Baverstock, left, who is in Grade 6, and Marysa Perreault. who is in Grade 4, nibble on delicious corn on the cob last week, replicating a Quebecois corn roast. The pair were named the King and Queen of the corn roast and wore the appropriate garments and crowns. School classes area conducted predominantly In French and it is governed by a province-wide school district. JENNIFER LANG PHOTO “Logic would have you think they particularly good solution,” Stuart with the coastal forest industry. The vote takes in only workers at the West Fraser sawmill here and at [WA-organized logging contractors. It doesn’t apply to workers at New Skeena Forest Products sawmill, where IWA members have ratified a new labour deal delivering a 20 per cent pay cut. Virtually all IWA workers in the region are out of work already because of New Skeena’s startup difficulties and because the West Fras- er mill here is shut down as a side effect of a strike at the company’s Kitimat pulp mill. The IWA strike vote and the chance it will result action raises the possibility that the West Fraser mill here could remain down be- hind picket lines even if striking pulp workers return to work in Kitimat. ning, he said, WA local seeks strike mandate on Friday IWA MEMBERS here will hold a strike vote Friday to back the union's demands in talks “It is possible,” said IWA business agent Surinder Malhotra, admitting the union would have more leverage if more mills were run- “It’s never the best time to go on a strike,” About 250 workers here will be part of the vote, Malhotra said. “The negotiations have failed to produce anything,” he said. - Cont'd Page A2 Alcan study touts oil, gas Big industries are fading — report By JEFF NAGEL OIL AND GAS both offshore and on dry land could pour jobs and industrial activity into the Kiti- mat-Terrace area in the coming decades, a new report predicts. “Go hard for the new energy investments,” urges the Alcun- sponsored study Kitimat: Unleash- ing the Potential. “It is truly the next big opportunity.” The study, which focuses on Kitimat’s economic outlook, con- cludes the town needs a true port ~ rather than its current collection of industrial docks.- That's a key step in positioning the region for oil and gas projects in the future, says Michael Heit, one of the authors. The drive to open up the B.C. coast to offshore oil has attracted the most attention, But Heit says onshore areas like the Bowser basin to the north, the Nechako basin to the east and even distant pipeline projects stand to be equally if not more important. Skilled workers connected to the oil industry will need to live somewhere, he said, fabrication and other services will have to be nearby and materials will have to come in through an ocean port, Regional providers of every- thing from. catering to technical support services could gain. New gas pipelines such as ones proposed to run along the Mack- enzie Valley and Alaska Highway will require massive amounts of pipe to be brought in. The study estimates those pi- pelines will require 6 million tonnes of steel — which Heit says could come in through Kitimat. _ More inside m™@ Sun setting on big three industries. AS “That’s the catalyst for starting a true port,” he says, “Kitimat and Terrace have to position them- selves for this.” Rather than a public port, he said, the Alberta oilpatch would prefer to deal with a private one — ideally a joint venture between existing Kilimat industries, The closest pipeline would be the proposed Enbridge route. Oil would come this direction via the proposed $2.5 billion pipe- line from the northern Alberta tar sands. Crude would be loaded onto tankers at either Kitimat or Prince Rupert and shipped to Pa- cific Rim destinations. That could see the construction of a terminal’ to accommodate giant tankers. The report forecasts major en- vironmental. group opposition — both to supertankers plying north coast waters and to a new pipe- line with the potential to spill oil rather than gas into area rivers. ing and get people back to work,” he turn to Page AIO.) Student count climbing back By JENNIFER LANG FAR FEWER students than expected showed up when school resumed Sept. 2, sending waves of panic across the Coast Mountains School district. At first, officials feared the worst — that the declining enrolment trend had finally gone into free fall. But dozens of additional students showed up by the time a second tally was completed Sept. 5, bringing en- rolment numbers back where they were expected lo be. “On Wednesday morning, I was having conniptions, assistant superintendent of schools Rob Greenwood said of the second day of classes. Caledonia Senior Secondary School originally report- ed counting just 502 students — 120 fewer than last Sep- tember, By Sept. 5 enrolment climbed to 564 students, which is higher than Greenwood projected. The same thing happened in Kitimat. Mount Eliza- beth Senior Secondary had 790 students the first day of classes, rising to 840 by the end of the week. This unexplained pattern occurs each fall, but “‘it was parlicularly bad this year,” said Greenwood. The district head count now stands at 6,227 students, a. figure Greenwood expects to clinb by 30-40 at the month’s end. He's waiting for numbers to improve in the Hazel- tons, where there are 80 less students than expected. Numbers are more reassuring at other local schools; there are now 622 students al Skeena Junior, and 222 at Thornhill Junior, figures that are in line with projections. There’s also been a surprising number of out-of-town registrations from places like Maple Ridge and Alberta. “I’m feeling a lot better about things. I think we'll be able to hold our own in terms of staffing and money,” said Greenwood. At this point, it looks like the district has lost about £37 students over the summer. The district had 6,364 students at the end of June, a drop from 6,600 at the start of the 2002-03 school year. School district budgets, doled out by the province, are directly dependent on student enrolment. Based on en- rolment projections for this school year, Coast Moun- tains school trustees chopped millions from the budget. Rather than close more schools, trustees opted to try something new: introduce to a four-day school week, a controversial move that’s supposed to save the cash- strapped district about $1.4 million. Greenwood is heading up a committee that will moni- tor the impact of the four-day school week. Invitations have just been sent out to representative teacher, parent, First Nation and business groups, in addition to adminis- trators and the RCMP. The district has also changed the school bus schedule to save money. That caused another hiccup as students returned to class last week. “ Well price rises ALREADY expensive repairs to the city’s water well are getting even more costly. Repairs to the Frank St, well’s motor were com- pleted in Calgary and it was about to be sent back when it failed a crucial test, says cily engineering services director Marvin Kwiatkowski. The motor's windings failed a high-voltage electrical test when it was submerged in water — a test it had passed when the assembly first arrived in Calgary. The motor will now have to be shipped to North Carolina to get its windings replaced, Kwiatkowski said. The repairs, previously estimated al up to $50,000, will now be more, he added, “I'd say it's another $20,000 plus,” he sald. The cily has been taking water from Deep Creek and the Skeena River since the well failed in April. But quantities are more limited than usual, prompting a summer of watering restrictions. City officials had hoped the well would haye been back on line months ago.