A Maple Bay resident says candidates in the municipal election need to be asked about where they stand when it comes to the Municipal Forest Reserve.
Icel Dobell says many people don’t know the Municipality of North Cowichan is one of the few communities in North America that has privately owned forest lands.
She said, considering the effects logging has on the environment, ratepayers should be concerned about the logging operations which, she says, bring minimal revenues to the Municipality.
“We are bringing in money for tourism and people are moving here and, people who are living here already are here for nature. If we continue logging at the rate that they are proposing for 2019 and going forward, we are going to be in trouble.”
The Municipal Forest Reserve is 5,000 hectares or 25 per cent of the land base in North Cowichan.
Dobell said the plan is to take out the equivalent of 770 logging trucks worth of trees out of the Reserve.
