To the editor,
Re: City will need to go to AAP for transfer of parkland, June 18.
Statements attributed to certain city officials contribute to the impairment of decision-making by proactive and passive electors alike. A moral imperative exists to call out errors, omissions, and misinformation that suppress fact-based critical thinking demanded by the AAP. Every elector is entitled to reasonably accurate information to render a judgment on appropriation of public parkland for commercial use.
A contract biologist tasked with environmental impact studies wrongly concluded that a low-quality wetland was dominated by invasive species. Such an assertion contradicts the higher-order scientific discovery that life on Earth is a single, dynamic, integrated system and not a collection of ecosystems arbitrarily defined to serve human analysis.
Municipal planning has determined an Extension Road gateway is the optimal link with the least traffic impact in the Chase River area. Traffic-calming structures approved and deployed by the city at the Lenwood Road and Roberta Road intersections straddle the proposed junction. A pedestrian-operated crosswalk stop at the Roberta crossing is the only yield for Extension vehicular traffic. Undeniable congestion and high rates of speed already recognized as worsening dangers on Extension Road are seriously misaligned with the park AAP initiative.
The mayor’s argument against a $300,000 referendum to deal with a $45,000 parkland transaction is a faulty comparison that requires a debit correction to the $45,000 sale price by factoring in external costs such as incremental pollution, biodiversity shrinkage, climate change hazards and lost recreational well-being that will cascade from parkland appropriation.
A call-to-arms goes out for the electoral body to combat irrevocable, policy-driven desecration of globally unique Vancouver Island parkland from ill-conceived municipal development schemes. The City of Nanaimo holds these diminishing green area in trust for the public domain inside its jurisdiction and must comply with that fiduciary duty to both the present community and future citizenry.
K.K. Beadall, Nanaimo
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