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Grimes to ‘cap the disarray’
There have been some very good letters to Castanet recently which have highlighted failures by our city government.
On May 30 Brad Airey wrote a letter confirming what I have been saying for a long time, namely that residential use of water is insignificant in the overall scheme of water usage from the lake. The biggest user of the water is mother nature herself who takes millions of litres daily by evaporation. As of today the city have not yet found a way of taxing her, but I guess they'll be working on that.
On June 6 Sharron Simpson wrote a long letter exposing the ways that the city have employed to try and avoid respecting the Simpson covenant.
On June 7 Jorgen Hansen reported how the city has left piles or well rotted manure, with all its attendant bacteria, right next to one of the creeks that feeds our lake and hence our drinking water.
On June 8 Dianne Varga tells us that the city is refusing to hand over documents relating to the Tourism Kelowna file unless a large payment is made. This despite the fact that the file is prepared by public servants at taxpayers' expense.
We also read that the city is considering the approval of 2 towers downtown that would be 29 and 36 storeys, even though that area is zoned for 24 storeys. Why is this even being considered? Are we trying to be a smaller version of Vancouver which has just become a concrete and glass wasteland?
Those of you who are receiving your latest water utility bill will find an insert in it telling you that you can only water on either odd or even days. This is of course to avoid drought condition and to conserve our precious resource. Some of you might find that it is a bit strange that city crews are out working round the clock to prevent further flooding whilst someone else at city hall sits there stuffing envelopes with notices telling us to use less water. I call it absolute madness, when they are releasing thousands of cubic metres of water daily through the channel, that we can't put some extra water on our lawns, flowers or vegetables.
You will note that there is a common theme to all these stories. It appears that although we have pretensions to being a well run, forward looking city, in fact we are being run more like the Wild West.
We should all remember these things next time we are required to elect new councillors.
Peter Emery
