Taha Attiah

In my previous role as the City's Community Development Coordinator from 2021-2024, one of my responsibilities was bringing a social lens to city long term planning processes and stakeholder led strategy documents.

I supported the City's 2025 Official Community Plan update, which has 'Climate Change Action' as 1 of 3 lenses for the entire document. I was invited on and participated as a steering committee member on Food Security Strategy, and participated in the development of the Tourism Revelstoke Destination Management Plan, which holds 'Pristine Environment' as Point 2 of 4 in the Strategic Framework.

I led an update to the Poverty Reduction Strategy with a focus on Housing, and created the City's first Temperature Emergency Response Plan, focused on supporting residents during extreme hot and cold weather.

One of the key recommendations I presented to Council at the completion of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Update was: (add a mandatory report section for 'Social and Environmental Impacts' to Council Reports) Too often, we've seen decisions at council that either downplayed or ignored the role of comprehensively researched, council approved documents, like the Official Community Plan.

I'm running for mayor to put practical governance, like the mandatory report sections described above, to provide staff direction that keeps Social and Environmental impacts in view. It's my sincere belief that when our community invests volunteer time, financial resources, and considerable effort to complete thorough planning processes, leadership should be upfront about when we diverge from planning documents for practical, financial, or political reasons.

I'll first qualify my survey answers on neutral responses I provided. I approach climate change with an affordability lens. My support is neutral for areas that could affect community members who are unable to bear the costs. Implementation and affordability distribution of a given proposal will be a consideration,

Climate change is real and accelerating, and we need only look to our summer months to see the evidence of impacts affecting our lives, and many of our community members' livelihoods, in a resort community.

My first priority would be assessing risks to critical infrastructure like water treatment. The facility has shown vulnerability to rapid temperature change in the past several years. My understanding is that smells emanating from ponds is compounded by rapid daily temperature swings. Assessment of critical infrastructure's vulnerability to extreme weather, temperature, and forest fires will give our city some measure of confidence to provide essential services in a changing climate.

Revelstoke should lead stakeholder collaboration on forest management practices in the areas within and surrounding municipal boundaries. The current firesmart commmittee meets 3x per year, which is not adequate to identifying opportunities for fire risk reduction and extending time in the event of an emergency. I have confidence that emergency response is preparing for scenarios, but we should also be working with wildland fire experts to understand opportunities for mitigation and prevention.

I support comprehensive land use planning and don't support data center on section 17 lands shown as an opportunity by MXD report presented July16th/2026COTW

The current governance policies for committees and commissions don't empower those groups with meaningful work, which is a structural issue that I dealt with up close as the staff liaison to the Social Development Committee. Our community has no shortage of expertise that could be improving our municipal decision making, and current policies limit that engagement. One of the least transparent practices I've noted in recent years is a tightening of governance rules that reduces the ability of these groups to even engage in meaningful conversation on the City's activities or decisions.

Our leadership should not balk from criticism, or refuse to have difficult conversations due to differences of opinion. I would request a review of governance changes that enables more public participation and invites more diverse opinions into the decisions that shape our future.

On the topic of RCFC, I understand and won't minimize the importance of forestry as a traditional industry that built our community and still provides good jobs. The municipal forestry corporation has an added layer of importance to municipal budgets; dividends from the corporation. The challenge I'd look to solve first is the budget gap without raising taxes on residents (see tourism), to enable transition to a more sustainable RCFC.

As noted above - Revelstoke needs to explore best practices for fuel management, and is in the rare position of owning a corporation that could help. I would support the exploration of fuel management by RCFC in the process of evaluating replacement visitor revenue opportunities.

My perspective on this is informed by considerable time working closely with the city's former contracted Indigenous Liason, and in my current work alongside the Indigenous Friendship Society of Revelstoke, through a partnership with the Community Housing Society.

I would support the city taking the most critical first step on this matter, which is the least exciting (to most), define a policy position towards work with Indigenous Nations and reconciliation. I didn't see support for that type of policy from this council, and with the city no longer engaging an indigenous liason, progress seems to have moved halted or moved backwards.

Without such a policy, I've observed that the organization is taking an inconsistent approach to the work of reconciliation depending on all sorts of variables; political will, subject matter, training / knowledge, staff capacity, and presence / absence of legislative requirements.

The first step in supporting reconciliation in any meaningful way, would be to develop a policy that includes clear statement of the city's role in supporting reconcilation, along with training and role specific considerations for the types of collaboration that are most likely to be encountered by staff.

That policy would be helpful for staff's development and skills, but arguably the more important effect would come from it's consistent implementation, signaling the importance of building and maintaining relationships with our local community and regional Nation partners, supporting community initiatives, and working to identify new opportunities for collaboration that we may not yet even know

I sat on the steering committee in the development of the Revelstoke Food Security Strategy to add input from an affordability standpoint, and the document that was adopted by the current council in 2024. The report itself is comprehensive and intricately tied to the city. 2 full pages are needed just to list the city policies referenced in the report from the Official Community Plan, Adopted Bylaws, Revelstoke Food Charter, and Sustainability Action Plan.

The Food Security Coordinator was a contract that was partially funded by Economic Opportunity Fund grants in Community Economic Development, funding that was renewed at the time of adoption by council. As recently as August 2026, a $5,000 increase in food security coordinator annual funding (going from 10,000 to 15,000 annually) was defeated in finance committee.

Some questions that come to mind are; what level of commitment does adoption of a strategy carry with council? What is the perceived value of having a sufficiently funded food security coordinator role with those that voted against the increase?

Given the vast set of strategy recommendations described and adopted by council, I tend to believe value of those actions successfully delivered to the community is far greater than the $5000 annual increase requested and would support it. I believe we need to develop metrics that are more reflective of the value to community when considering these types of grant requests. Basic example: how much external (non-city) funding was leveraged/secured by the food security coordinator in the prior 12-24 months?

Meaningful bylaw enforcement that regulates bear attractants, and has financial penalties for clear violations of safe storage of attractants, should be a baseline requirement for a mountainous community. With bears forming part of our community identity, a culture of safe practices towards them should be a point of pride for Revelstoke. I would support development of such bylaws; the most basic of which should be adopted quickly to deal with egregious situations.

Given the lack of conservation officers in our community, we may also want to explore training or providing guidelines for bylaw and RCMP officers, to respond effectively and safely in situations where an animal is involved, or a potential human encounter is reported.

Our communications staff could work with local Bear Aware to develop seasonal, timely, and educational content for communication to residents, which would be useful season after season - similar to seasonal communication on extreme heat events. If Tourism Revelstoke doesn't already, they would be the perfect group to develop education for visitors on safe outdoor etiquette, attractants and bear encounters, which will also reduce encounters.

I truly believe this is the biggest question for the future of our community; all other decisions are downstream from our ability to manage the impacts and opportunities posed by tourism and the number of people it brings to our community.

In 2026, Revelstoke's tourism economy is what's driving community growth; providing accommodation, experiences, food & beverage, services, and retail, with a reputation as a desirable place to live that drives new residential construction.

More people = more impact on our infrastructure. More roads and repaving, more wear and tear on bridges, water and sewer to new parts of town, and wastewater treatment that sees a lot more volume. Meanwhile, our City has a tax base on a dated model of industrial and residential development.

We have started to see what doesn't work. The traditional property tax funding model is to attract enough hotels, businesses, and developers by incentivizing them to invest here, for fear they could move on from Revelstoke. In return, the bet is that property taxes will grow to fund our increase infrastructure demands.

That approach leads to packing in as many people as Revelstoke can (or can't) sustain, approving as much development as people will tolerate, and raising taxes on those who live here to make up the shortfall.

Revelstoke needs a mayor with the leadership, drive and energy to be relentless in pursuing provincially legislated Resort Municipality funding tools that fall on visitors, so we can pull back from a "grow at all costs" approach.