Riversdale Reception

Last night I joined the in-crowd at an invited guests only wine & cheese reception hosted by our municipality to welcome the Boyz from Australia who plan on doing a little mining in our area.

This still being a 'conditional' sale there is no guarantee that at the end of the day we'll actually see mining again in this area by these guys (even possibly after conditions are removed), so the word 'planning' is paramount here. Also if anything was to happen it won't be overnight as we are looking at a minimum of 5 years, considering the required environmental study will take 2-3 years by itself alone.

The Boyz made it quite clear that not much of substance with respect to jobs, investments in the community, etc. will take place here for quite some time, nevertheless that has not stopped this mayor, council and administration from trying to capitalize on this from a political point of view, with more to come on this matter, I'm sure, before our next municipal election in the fall.

For those who are rightfully disturbed with this mayor's elitist misguided class conscious attitude and insistence in dividing our community even further by holding separate venues for this event (as he did recently with the Branding gala), literally snubbing and slapping in the face the 99%ers in this community, let me say that after the introduction by the mayor and presentations by each of the three Auzzies representing Riversdale Resources nothing much was different between the invited guests session only and the general public session of this event, except in the open public session Q&A's were entertained, whereas this did not happen during the invited quests session where one-on-one and group mingling primarily took place.

Let me just say here, working the room as I did, all I heard from people there was how impressed they were with our guest speakers presentations. They did an excellent job in laying out who they were, their experience and background, their vision and plan, and hopes. At no time did we feel they were being anything but truthful and honest with us, no snow-jobbing the yokels took place here. In fact, several times they made a point of telling people not to expect much for years to come, because that is how long it will take for things to start happening, if and when they do?

Like I said, their presentations and the format at both the invited guests only session and the open to the public one were pretty much identical except in the latter they entertained open questions from the floor. Some of these questions were hard hitting, maybe even hostile, and some others were way premature or not even relevant to our situation here. Through all these questions our guests handled themselves quite well I thought, being both professional and down to earth at the same time, in their casual everyday man's attire (no suits here).

Anyhow the bottom line I think is our administration is trying to make a lot of political hay over this possible mining venture and will continue to do so, bringing them out on display, so to speak, from time to time like they did last night, from now until October. Having little to nothing to do about them coming here (it was the coal that brought them) they nevertheless are trying to make something out of nothing when the facts are clear that at this stage of the game, "it's much ado about nothing".

To wrap up here, based on this mayor being more of an educator than a business person, and knowing his dismal economic track record to-date specifically to the sale of the CLC (which I will speak to shortly in a future post) where I understand from the few details made available to the public on this transaction that he sold us short, literally giving away the farm.

In this regard, I do not think it would be in the best interest of this community to have this mayor re-elected and in a position to negotiate with Riversdale Resources (if this conditional sale is actually firmed up as a done deal) on our behalf. In fact, I fear for our community's future if otherwise. Knowing as we do, the only tool the mayor has is a hammer, he tends to see every problem as a nail. Much destruction and damage to our community has already been done by this man and his administration in the last two-plus-years, how much more will be done if re-elected... and given a sledgehammer?




When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.