Amalgamation

After walking for a few weekends, it is apparent amalgamation with North Cowichan is an issue.  I whole heartedly support amalgamation.  We live in a town that pays 30% more residential taxes than our neighbours’ and our businesses pay 38% more.  Many businesses I have talked to don't like doing business in Duncan because of the beauracracy, expense, taxes, and additional expense required to do business in our town.

As residents, we have basically the exact same services as our neighbour (we both pay for them) but have a 30% greater tax burden.

It doesn't take an economics major to see that we can be run far more efficiently as a single community, after all, the first savings will come from laying off politicians.

I believe we can make the merge fairly painless by slowly merging our services, removing staff by attrition (not layoffs) and by having regular reorganizations.