West Kelowna study to focus on increasing entry and exit points to neighbourhood

Photo: Contributed

People living in a West Kelowna neighbourhood that’s had several close calls with wildfires brought their safety concerns to the city this week.

People living in a West Kelowna neighbourhood that’s had several close calls with wildfires this week brought their safety concerns to the city.

Glenrosa Residents Association held a town hall meeting Thursday night and turned their attention to, among other things, the access and egress shortcomings in the growing neighbourhood.

“There’s basically one way out the top (of the neighbourhood) and two ways out out of the bottom in that area and they're fairly close together,” City of West Kelowna’s Ron Bowles said, acknowledging that it's not ideal.

“It's a concern for the residents because there's been a few close calls with wildfires in the last number of years—three of them in the last decade.”

Bowles told residents the city is doing a study on egress and access issues to try to find what options that they can look into more closely.

“We've also been doing some things over the last while and putting in secondary roads in and whatnot, just to make sure there's many more options,” he said.

Bowles said the city has found a way to link upper Glenrosa area to lower Glenrosa through an alternate route near one of the area schools.

“It's a one-way-out route that only is used in emergencies,” he said.

The city also now has the ability to turn the lights coming out of Glenrosa all green so they can evacuate people faster, if that was ever required.

“There's been some improvements, but we'd like to look at other options as well. Most of the discussion was around that," Bowles said.

There was also some concerns raised about the volume of development happening and Bowles said that it was a mix of all types of product. Most of which is infill and won’t move higher into the treelined.

“I thought it was very, very positive just in that it’s getting people together and having a conversation,” he said.

Dan Goy, president of the Glenrosa Residents Association, agreed the meeting went well. Earlier, he had said that he wanted to see transparency and good communication between the residents and city hall.

“(Bowles) did a great job explaining where a number of the projects are,” Goy said.