The free ride is over for electric vehicles as the District of Sicamous closes the charging station to the public.
When the station was originally installed, there weren't many available locally so the district allowed free charging to increase tourism and encourage visitors to shop, dine and play in town while they waited. At the June 26 Committee of the Whole meeting, council received a letter from local James Murray who pointed out there is no way to be sure those using the charging station are "spending any money in town."
"I would give the opinion that if they have gone out of their way to get a 'free' charge on their journey, they are likely not spending any other money here," he wrote. "This service does not seem to be very advantageous or serve a realistic purpose to the taxpayers of this community and in my opinion should be stopped immediately."
While Coun. Malcolm Makayev could see Murray's point, he pointed out there is signage installed stating a two-hour maximum, adding that someone on Facebook had done the calculations to figure out the cost of that, saying that it looked accurate.
"So it works out... for a two-hour charge is about 36 cents. Their, the citizen's concern is, should we be... giving away electricity for free," he said, adding that staff had planned to look into the accumulative costs to the district.
"Looking at the usage, because we don't have it monitored just for the charging station... but just looking at the overall cost of electricity for this building, we couldn't see any large increases from when that charging station had been put in to now," chief financial officer Bianca Colonna reported.
Operations manager Darrell Symbaluk agreed the EV station hadn't had much impact on the district's power costs, but said the initial install had. The first unit cost about $10,000, he said, then they had to put everything in place to connect it to the electrical room, and estimated that the district paid about $15,000 each for the installation of the two.
He added that changing them out for stations that charge to use wouldn't really be feasible.
"They're not able to be converted over to pay as you go, they'd have to be replaced. We'd have to put new units in that could do that," Symbaluk explained. "So it'd be a pretty good investment to have to switch them over."
That caused some hesitation for Coun. Ian Baillie, who agreed with Murray's letter about ending free use, but not at that much of a cost to the district.
"I agree with his point... we don't give away free gas cards," he said. "But if it's going to cost even more to change it over, that's not going to be worth it either, so it's a little bit of a pickle here. But I totally agree with what he's saying and the principle behind it."
Symbaluk pointed out that public works now uses an electric fleet that requires charging, as well as the Eagle Valley Transportation Society, and suggested limiting station use to authorized vehicles only. That was unanimously accepted by council and directed staff to install signage stating that.
"I agree that we really don't need to have these available for public use," Coun. Parm Beech added. "And this is a good point made by a taxpayer."
