Community Excellence Awards

The Thompson-Nicola Regional District won the 2024 “Excellence in Governance” award at the 2024 Community Excellence Awards award for its commendable work on transparent communications and education on taxes. 

The City of Victoria was recognized at the 2024 Community Excellence Awards for its concerted and creative effort to revitalize the downtown core through OUR DWTN, a program that zeroes in on safety, cleanliness, beautification and activation.

Sustainability often refers to renewable materials and environmental metrics. But this year’s winner of Excellence in Sustainability took a step back and reimagined its whole planning framework through a sustainable lens. The City of Nanaimo was recognized for Excellence in Sustainability for its city plan, integrated action plan and monitoring strategy called, Nanaimo ReImagined

The City of Kelowna was recognized by UBCM’s Community Excellence Awards for its new enterprise asset management system. To help manage its estimated $7 billion in infrastructure assets, the City of Kelowna spent five years developing an enterprise asset management system that now connects the work of more than 700 staff members.

The District of Central Saanich was recognized by the UBCM Presidents Committee for outstanding achievement in transparent planning and reporting at this year’s Community Excellence Awards. The winning project took a disjointed and siloed planning process that caused frustration and confusion – and turned it into an integrated framework to make collaborative progress on community priorities.

Sustainability is a mindset relevant in several core local government operations. In Metro Vancouver, one award-winning example is the Lulu Island Renewable Natural Gas Facility. The facility captures and cleans excess biogas from wastewater treatment and sells the scrubbed gas to FortisBC for residential distribution. The facility takes waste, and turns it into a resource.