– RJ Senko is a Vice-President at the Esquimalt Chamber and President of RJStrategies. He can be reached at 250-888-3534.
ESQUIMALT – Your Chamber is starting off September with an equal dichotomy of emotions as we say “A la prochaine” to our Office Administrator, Willow Thompson. Willow has been a tremendous asset these past few months as we transitioned our office administrative procedures. Unfortunately for us, Willow has been accepted full time to complete her Chartered Accountant schooling. We wish Willow all the best with her studies and are also pleased she will continue to work with us as a member of the Board.
At our last Board meeting Willow was elected to serve as our Treasurer meaning members can rest assured our accounts are in competent hands.
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Presently, we are working with our colleagues at the Greater Victoria Chamber to ensure continued staffing of our office and possibly even some enhanced service offerings to our members. Our effort to integrate our two Chambers has made such an arrangement possible and is a concrete example of the benefits of joining forces.
Of course, the final decision on the integration will be up to members.
It is hoped the Integration Committee will be in a position to report out later this fall, which will provide us with an opportunity to take the final agreement to members.
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We were disappointed to see Esquimalt lagging far behind other Island communities in terms of multi-family developments and building permits. According to the second quarter stats released by the Urban Development Institute Esquimalt had no multi-family units under construction as of June 30th and ranked 7th out of 8 municipalities in the Capital Region in terms of the number of units that are currently in the rezoning or permit stages.
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Speaking of permits the same statistics show Esquimalt did not break the top ten in terms of the value of total building permits issued Island wide in the first six months of 2016. Victoria topped the list at $156 million followed by Nanaimo ($99M), Saanich ($87M) and Langford ($77M).
However, keeping with the dichotomy theme, Esquimalt has reported a positive improvement in its Business Licence processing times. Esquimalt staff say streamlining and improved tracking have cut average processing times in half (from roughly a month down to two weeks). On behalf of all our current and future members we say, “congratulations and thank you”!
