March 2017 | Business View Magazine

180 181 the most dependent on forestry,” he states. But over the last several years, Quesnel’s abil- ity to rely on exploiting that particular natural resource has been jeopardized, and Simpson says that unless the town was able to figure out a way to wean itself from wood and transform itself into a very different type of community, it would slowly die like many other primary-de- pendent communities have done in the past. Simpson recounts that he intuited the town’s potential demise years ago when he first sus- pected that the allowable timber cut that the government establishes annually, and which it regards as sustainable, “would come crashing down at some point, because the forests would not be able to sustain the levels of harvesting that we were living off of.” Then, in 2002, a catastrophic, natural event precipitated an even quicker downfall of the town’s forestry industry. “The Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic went on an exponential uptick,” he continues. “The community is dependent, almost solely, on the pine forest.We have fir and spruce around, as well, but in nominal amounts; we’re 80 percent pine-dependent. So, everybody who knew what they were looking at, knew that we were going to experience something fundamentally differ- ent than we have ever experienced before, with respect to the death of our pine forests. And as the forest sector goes, so can go the communi- Quesnel, British Columbia ty. And if we’re not very deliberate, we can be in that boom and, ultimate, bust cycle that so many communities have experienced for centuries. So now,” he asks, “how do you take a community that has the potential to wind down because its core economy is going to be in trouble?” The answer, according to the town’s leaders, was to reinvent the community in a way that allows it not merely to survive an onerous transition period, but to thrive through it and come out the other end as a transformed town with a new brand, a new way of doing municipal business, and a revitalized tax structure. “And in order to do that, we spent the last couple of years getting fiscal sustainability,” says Simpson. “Up until 2015, this community was carrying a $2.4 million infrastructure deficit for roads, sewers, sidewalks, water systems, etc. And we had an operating budget that was sucking up all of the available cash. So, over the last two years, we’ve reduced our operating budget by ten percent.We took $1.2 million out of our budget, with some nominal service cuts, and nominal restructuring of our workforce, and then raised taxes signifi- cantly on our residents for two pur- poses: one, to be self-financing on our infrastructure. Lots of municipalities de-