As Citizen city hall reporter Charelle Evelyn's series looking back on the 40th anniversary of the amalgamation of the outlying neighbourhoods into Prince George shows, so many of the current problems facing mayor, city council and residents to this day came from those optimistic but naive days from 1974 and 1975.
Perhaps it was inevitable.
Kamloops and Kelowna had been forced by the NDP provincial government to expand their municipal boundaries in 1973. Although the government assured Prince George it wouldn't expand without the support of residents, then-mayor Harold Moffat formed a committee to study the idea. By the time it was taken to a community vote on Nov. 2, 1974, "amalgamation was sold to the residents of what would become the current-day Prince George as a necessity," Evelyn wrote.
Politicians across the spectrum, locally and provincially, provided grim warnings of life without amalgamation for the outlying areas, of wells running dry, septic fields overflowing, and no one to answer calls for firefighters or police officers.
Moffat made passionate pleas about the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for area residents to work together for the betterment of the city, with a broader tax base to pay for it all. Within city limits, Prince George voters heard him, with 77.7 per cent backing amalgamation. Outside of the boundaries of the day, only College Heights and Peden Hill supported joining Prince George, with South Fort George, North Nechako, Blackburn and the Hart all voting no. Since the vote was an all-or-nothing affair and the overall total was 55.3 per cent in support, that was enough to drag everyone else in.
On New Year's Day 1975, Prince George was suddenly 345 square kilometres in size with 60,000 residents.
And here is where the problems began.
Four decades later, history would show Lorne McCuish was right. The lone voice on Prince George city council opposed to amalgamation, McCuish said the $5.25 million payment from the province to Prince George wasn't even close to high enough to pay for expanded water and sewer service.
"We're inheriting a bad show," McCuish told the Citizen in October 1974. "The government wants the city to pick up the tab for somebody else's mistakes."
The bad show started immediately after the curtain went up on the new Prince George. Instead of essential services like water, sewer and roads, half of the money went to new recreational and cultural amenities in or near the city centre. Even that was poorly handled. Instead of setting up small neighbourhood library branches, one large central branch was built downtown (today's Bob Harkins branch). The Hart got the Elksentre but College Heights didn't get a rink. A new livestock arena, Kin 3, was built at the exhibition grounds but the parts of the city where livestock was actually raised got nothing of the sort.
And then the NDP got the boot and Social Credit returned to power in Victoria. Suddenly, there was a provincial austerity program and Prince George was being scolded by the provincial government for presuming that the money set aside in amalgamation for capital projects didn't have an expiry date.
The battle for provincial assistance from Victoria for infrastructure dollars for Prince George continues to this day. Vanway resident Florence Bernt wrote a letter to the Citizen in the fall of 1976 that largely still holds true today.
"We still have our own wells, our own septic tanks, no fire protection, unpaved roads and no street lights. (We) dump our own garbage," she wrote. "What have we gained? The right to a free library card. ... Remember that we didn't want you, you wanted us."
As for sewer connections in the Hart Highlands, work started in 1977 and a five-year $9.9 million plan was unveiled to connect the whole neighbourhood to city lines. Four decades later, that work is still happening but now on a piecemeal basis, street by street and house by house, with homeowners being charged tens of thousands of dollars to pay for it themselves.
The dominant concerns that came out of amalgamation - the tension between spending on culture and recreation or infrastructure, changing government priorities in Victoria, rural versus urban homeownership, downtown core investment - are as difficult now as they were in the 1970s.
Sadly, there's little evidence to suggest there will be much improvement before the 50th anniversary of amalgamation in Prince George.
