Last week's spectacular failure to win support from the Agricultural Land Commission for a big sports facility on Okanagan College land is troubling Vernon Mayor Wayne Lippert. He says all Greater Vernon politicians should have been involved in the effort to convince the Commission to release ten acres from the Land Reserve. ``It's time that everybody looked at the greater good for the community,'' says Lippert. ``Too often, too many times, at Greater Vernon that doesn't happen.'' The District of Coldstream took the lead, handling for the College, the land application which ultimately failed. Nevertheless, there have been some angry Facebook comments over the decision, some blaming Vernon council. Lippert suggests the City played a peripheral role. ``The City of Vernon, except for being able to give a support role if asked, was left out of it,'' says Lippert. ``It was all of Coldstream council's process to handle.'' In fact, Lippert says that when the Land Commission showed up for a site visit, only members of Coldstream staff and politicians as well as College officials were there. ``Areas B&C and Vernon were not invited,'' says Lippert. During the visit, SUN FM reported that NORD staff were also not on the guest list. Meanwhile, Coldstream councillor Richard Enns says there is a year to re-apply. He is also calling for the ``entire community'' to work on another bid if the College wants to put forward another application. Enns says it's up to Greater Vernon Parks and Rec to provide better information in order to establish ``a community need'' for the track facility.
4 comments:
There has never been an established "need" expressed in terms of number of sports users in GVAC documents. In fact the GVS Master Plan from some years ago suggested an abundance of sports fields for Greater Vernon users, and even missed some in its inventory. Need was not defined when the "Spicer Block" fiasco was proposed, and there isn't one for the proposed Kin Race Track development. In fact , for Kin , the majority of participants in the open houses were people who wanted to protect and continue use of the horse race track, not desperate forgotten sports users.
Nobody talks about the declining demographics of the young people in this community, and the decreasing need for facilities in general. We could see a high school close in a few years due to declines in enrollment and consolidation of students. This will leave a lot of open unused green space for our aging population to walk their dogs. The lack of existing facility for track and field, and football comes from very poor planning on the part of GVAC, and poor communication with the school board. Their needs were expressed years ago!
What is truly unique about this college proposal is the ability to actually get both community use and college use out of it, and maybe even serve as a small economic driver, rather than another tax burden. As for the price tag......back to the drawing board, $8 million is ridiculous.
This is just another example in a long list of futile government debacles brought about by infighting and the inability for local politicians to co-ordinate this area.
This project was turned down because our local polititians had no clear vision of what is needed and once again failed to co-ordinate the numerous levels of government this area is overloaded with.
We just came out of the failed lenghty and costly parks review (initiated by Coldstream) and find ourselves picking up the tab again on another failed project.At least we are keeping the city planners,politicians and staff busy,not to mention consultants, architecs and lawyers.
At the end of it all we have no facilities for our youth and athletes to compete and train at and a big loss of time and money that could of been spent elsewhere to benefit our region.
We need to amalgamate before it is too late and create a functional central government for the area that doesn't spend all its time and money on arguing amoungst the numerous local factions we have now. Just getting rid of the duplication of services we see in this relatively small community and putting everything under one roof would be a huge savings.
Lets end this dysfuntional mess now and get on with improving and maintaining the infrastructure we need to move ahead and keep our area strong.
Does anyone agree?
Yes Mr. T., amalgamation would resolve all issues. Just ask residents of the former Electoral Area "A". Imagine how much benefit residents of Lavington would have from such amalgamation!
It is worth noting that the Chair of GVAC did not show up at the College's announcement of the proposed new development. That showed great support for the proposal! In fact, no Vernon Council members showed up at the initial announcement.
The Land Commission makes its decision based on available evidence and what is best for agriculture.
There's an oval track in Lumby (Oval Park, is what the locals call it). It is near the high school, skateboard park, beach volleyball, swimming pool, tennis courts, children's playground, curling rink, hockey rink and community hall. Oh, there's a fastball diamond inside the oval, which is used a lot, so keep your head up.
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