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   CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
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 Choo-choo!
 Wyatt Slugoski, 3, tries out the new playground at the Central B.C. Railway and Forestry Museum Friday. The playground project was generously funded by the Prince George Community Foundation, Dollar Saver Lumber, Carrier Lumber and Rolling Mix Concrete. The structure was built by volunteer Larry Townsand.
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  GROWING PAINS
Effects of amalgamation still being felt around city
Part 3 in a series
There were raised voices and even some tears as nearly 40 years of frustration spilled over in the Hart Highlands elementary school gymnasium on Feb. 5.
  Words like frustration, disillusion and even extortion were thrown around as dozens of residents, representing 100 Hart property owners facing thousands of dollars in additional taxes for the installation of city sanitary sewer lines, pleaded their case to city staff, members of city council
- really anyone who would listen
- for some financial assistance.
  At issue was the city’s one
application for a joint federal-provincial grant, the first intake of the New Building Canada Fund’s Small Communities Fund, that city staff had recommended be used for an erosion mitigation project on the Fraser Bench lands in Lower College Heights.
  Ultimately, city council decided to go with the staff recommendation, leaving the Hart residents
to consider saying “yes” to a potential $2.9 million project that would finally allow them to get rid of their septic systems.
  “We all want it to get done, but the costs are astronomical,” said Sylvia Korotash.
  Korotash, a Hart Highlands resident, has been working for months to research grant opportunities and lobby the city for financial assistance.
  But she is just the latest part of a decades-old saga that dates back to when the Hart was brought inside the boundaries of the city of Prince George in 1975.
  Decades after amalgamation, growing pains are still being felt in a city that had grown too large, too quickly without the necessary investment in infrastructure that people believed would come with the creation of a greater Prince George.
Essential services
  “As of this day, a new horizon unfolds for the city of Prince George.”
  With those words, former
 CHARELLE EVELYN
cevetyn@pgcitizen.ca
 mayor Harold Moffat ushered in the first elected city council of the newly amalgamated municipality, created in the wake of a 55.3 per cent favourable referendum vote two months prior.
   According to minutes of the inaugural Jan. 6, 1975, meeting used by local historian Valerie Giles for her 2007 book Harold Moffat and the Northern Hardware: Prince George Icons, Moffat noted the expansion of city’s boundaries - its 11th since incorporation in 1915 - would not only bring an increase to the tax base, but “it also brought responsibility for providing essential services.”
   Though the city received a more than $5 million pay out from the province to help smooth the transition, it didn’t go to those essential services that Mof-
fat highlighted in his inaugural speech.
  A letter to the editor published in the Sept. 10, 1976 edition of The Citizen outlined one resident’s frustrations.
  “We still have our own wells, our own septic tanks, no fire protection, unpaved roads and no street lights. (We) dump our own garbage,” wrote Vanway resident Florence Bernt. She expressed incredulity that the issues would be sorted out in the promised five years as the city was also starting to plan for the development of Cran-brook Hill. “What have we gained? The right to a free library card. ... Remember that we didn’t want you, you wanted us, forget Cran-brook Hill for a while and give (us) what amalgamation promised.”
  In its July 1974 submission to the ministry of municipal affairs, the restructure committee - the group created by Moffat in 1973 to study the feasibility of a greater Prince George - acknowledged bringing every resident up to city standards for utilities would be difficult.
  The committee made note of “inadequate water supply and
sewer facilities” that were provided with the original purchase price of homes in areas such as Parkridge Heights and Western Acres.
  While amalgamation is usually thought of as a coming together, in the city’s case it seemed at times to be more of an arranged marriage - the formalities were worked out at an upper level leaving many who felt they ultimately didn’t have a proper voice in the proceedings.
  In the days immediately following the successful Nov. 2, 1974, vote, the first - and last - mayor of South Fort George Len Proppe expressed his displeasure with the result.
  “This was not asked for by the people,” Proppe told The Citizen. “The NDP forced amalgamation on them and used the city council as its dupe to do it.”
  Proppe’s village of South Fort George, which had been incorporated as a municipality only six years prior, barely mustered up 23 per cent approval for joining Prince George.
                                                                                                                                                               — see HOLDING, page 3
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