Questions for candidates

Kelowna has amazing natural beauty within the city and all around it.  For many people, Okanagan Lake is their favourite Kelowna feature. 

All of the world's great waterfront cities have made a point of increasing access to their shorelines and beaches for both residents and visitors.  Think of Vancouver's beloved Seawall and their English Bay beaches. 

In Kelowna, from the Bennett Bridge up to Rotary Marsh we have a good template for what we could eventually do with our shoreline on the other side of the Bridge down to Mission Creek.  Within this roughly 5 kilometres of shore south of the bridge we now have a few small to medium size parks.  Unfortunately, they are disconnected from one another by long rows of waterfront houses.  In many locations the owners of these houses have erected illegal barriers near the water.  These barriers prevent us from walking from park to park along the shore of the lake that we all collectively own. 

The most common barriers on our shoreline are private docks, built on public land.  Most of them do not have the legally required stairs on both sides that allow you to climb over them.  Adding the stairs, or other means to walk over these docks, should be the minimum required.  Ideally, the province will eventually decrease the number of docks by refusing permits for new and replacement ones, and not renewing the permits when properties are sold.

BC's Natural Resource Officers have many important responsibilities.  One of these is enforcing the laws that enable public access to our foreshore.  For decades that has rarely been done in Kelowna.  Because the province largely ignored infractions, many lakefront property owners erected more and more illegal barriers.  One reason given by BC as to why it disregards these provincial laws is that there are insufficient funds available to hire enough NROs.  A very simple and effective solution, that would not result in more taxation, would be to drastically increase fines to offenders and to then funnel this money into paying for more NROs. 

When BC politicians start asking for your vote in the May 9th provincial election, please ask them to:

1.  Commit to hiring more Natural Resource Officers to enforce the existing laws, and
2.  Open up public access to our Okanagan Lake by decreasing the number of private docks.

Al Janusas