> From: "Michael R. Collins" <MRC.OlympusList@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> You can't have escaped that much of modern life when...
>
> "... We feel tennis and pickleball is a recipe for conflict
Sigh. It's been said that Salt Spring Island is "10,000 arguments, surrounded
by water." :-)
Serves them right. PARC (Parks And Recreation Commission) is a mammoth
bureaucracy that (self-admittedly) consumes over half of the local government
budget, a government that encompasses the provincial capital of Victoria, as
well as tens of rural islands.
Their favourite "rural abuse" is to try to take agricultural land out of zoning
that protects it from development, to develop soccer fields and ball diamonds.
They've been slapped in the face TWICE for that, but they keep trying. The last
time, they managed to spend nearly $100,000 of taxpayers' money on promoting
the idea, while arguing that buying land that was not zoned agricultural and
that was adjacent to existing facilities (the one mentioned above, in fact) was
"too expensive."
I was on the Agricultural Advisory Planning Commission at the time. I raised
the motion to "not forward" PARC's request to the provincial Agricultural Land
Commission, based on our Official Community Plan's dictate that appropriating
farm land should only be considered when adjacent to existing facilities.
Two days later, I was dismissed from the Commission. I was told they needed
"new blood" on the Commission. I was replaced by a farmer with school-aged
kids, who might want to play soccer and baseball, and the new Commission STILL
unanimously turned down the request. Which PARC ignored, since we are only an
"advisory" Commission. Then the provincial ALC slapped them silly, and told
them to stop pilfering agricultural land -- the second time in ten years.
Sorry for venting. First-world problems, indeed.
Requisite on-topic info: think I'll go take some farmland pictures, before it
all goes away, and I have to head to a Scottish peninsula...
Jan
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