City's fetish for tall buildings

Re: Better options for RMCP lot

To answer Laura Doncom’s question:

‘How can they vote to give up the RCMP/Doyle Ave property in the centre of our Cultural District to a developer for a high-rise condominium building before the Cultural Facilities Master Plan has been completed?'

We are allowed to speculate they don’t have the intellectual capacity to appreciate the importance of maintaining and promoting a vibrant culture and heritage community in our city, let alone what it is.

Our city councillors have an obvious fetish for tall buildings, high-rises, sky-scrapers, you name it, and the taller – the better.

Their infatuation seems insatiable and serves their one and only ambition well, to grow our city bigger (and uglier) and the sooner the better.

There is also a total disconnect for social needs like parks and playgrounds. We all desperately need open spaces to create and maintain peaceful and tranquil environments to balance a increasingly challenging and stressful socio-economic environment.

Our city’s Official Community Plan (OCP) on how our city should grow and develop in an orderly fashion and longer term has instead become a public record of how our city is building and growing without any direction, and should be re-named ‘as it happens’.

An attempt to appreciate what the word culture means to our city councillors we only need to look at all those ugly bill-boards that are defacing the landscape as we enter our beautiful city.

A very greedy and aggressive business community has managed to convince our city councillors past and present that these obnoxious bill-boards brings business to Kelowna.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

They serve absolutely no useful purpose, except perhaps as an item in an artist’s collection of extreme corporate graffiti.

We also have a unique noise culture in Kelowna, thanks to a city council who insists there is nothing they can do about it.

An increasing number of motor-vehicles with flow-through mufflers, modified to produce extremely high noise levels now represent a serious invasion of our privacy and has become an incredible impediment on our quality of life.

The cultural deficit at city hall is now so severe that if we were to replace the ‘sails’ with something more representative of our current tone-deaf city councillors, it would have to be a set of chrome-plated flow-through mufflers.

Andy Thomsen