IT support for Pitt Meadows businesses.

IT for a small city with a wide mix of work

Pitt Meadows has about 19,000 residents, but its economy covers more ground than the size suggests. Around 700 small businesses are licensed here, and roughly 86 per cent of the land sits in the Agricultural Land Reserve. Commercial life gathers in a few places: the shops and offices along Harris Road in the town centre, the large-format stores at Meadowtown Centre on the Lougheed Highway, the riverfront storefronts of Osprey Village, and the warehouses on Airport Way.

Golden Ears Business Park spans 189 acres of light industrial, office and warehouse space between the airport and the Golden Ears Bridge, and its newer phases have brought a steady rise in business licences. Next door, Pitt Meadows Regional Airport (YPK) ranks among the busiest airports in BC by aircraft movements, with about ten flight training schools plus charter operators, maintenance shops and parts suppliers. These businesses depend on training records, maintenance logs and bookings that must be there every morning and backed up every night, often on a network that runs from a front desk out to a hangar or loading bay.

Farming is a working industry here, not just scenery. Pitt Meadows grows about 20 per cent of BC's blueberries and ranks sixth among BC municipalities for agricultural production, with cranberries, dairy, nursery stock and greenhouse crops alongside. A farm with a packing shed, seasonal crews and buyers waiting on invoices needs what any office needs: accounts that are tidied up when the season ends, Wi-Fi that reaches the outbuildings, and records that do not live on one ageing PC in the farmhouse.

Getting around shapes the working day. The Lougheed Highway crosses the Pitt River Bridge into Port Coquitlam, the Golden Ears Bridge runs south to Langley and Surrey, and the West Coast Express stops just off Harris Road on its weekday trips to downtown Vancouver. The rail main line also cuts through town, and between them the Harris Road and Kennedy Road crossings are blocked by trains for more than five hours a day on average. When a train or a bridge backup holds people up, staff who can sign in securely from home or a job site keep the day moving.

Pitt Meadows is close to home for us, between Maple Ridge and the Tri-Cities, so on-site visits here are routine. Everyday problems are handled remotely by the person who knows your setup, usually the same day. Hands-on work such as fitting out a new unit on Airport Way, reworking a network or replacing hardware is booked as a scheduled visit.

Questions from Pitt Meadows