City may scrap vision for park
Plan to buy neighbouring properties to add to Skaha park not working out, report to council says
It’s time to abandon a poorly executed 30-year-old plan to expand Skaha Lake Park, say staff at Penticton city hall.
City council at its meeting Tuesday will receive a report from staff that recommends lifting the parks designation on eight waterfront properties along South Beach Drive and Sudbury Drive.
Although developed with homes, the properties were designated for future park use in the 1990 version of the city’s official community plan. At the same time, council of the day endorsed a plan to purchase all eight properties as they became available with the intent of eventually converting them all to park land.
Since then, the city has acquired just two of those properties, and the estimated cost to buy the other six is in the range of “tens of millions of dollars,” according to a report penned by city planner Steven Collyer.
He’s recommending council now lift that future parks designation to help the city sell its single waterfront property at 300 Sudbury Ave – which straddles a second lot at 298 South Beach Dr. – that was valued at $1.7 million as of July 2020 by the BC Assessment Authority.
“The sale of the subject lands and the substantial return the city should receive for the waterfront land will allow for more strategic purposes in other areas, where land values may be less,” writes Collyer.
As for abandoning the 30-yearold vision of park expansion, he notes that although it was originally expected to take 40 to 50 years to buy up all eight lots, that timeline now appears overly optimistic.
“Based on the history of the city-owned property, and the fact that over nearly three decades the parks vision for these lands has not materialized, it is not anticipated that the city would acquire six more private properties… and covert them all into public park land,” writes Collyer.
He also notes that more recent planning exercises have suggested building new parks in under-served parts of the city.
The original plan for expanding Skaha Park into the Sudbury Avenue area also envisioned the city snapping up an additional 15 properties, but that aspect of it was scrapped in 1992.
If council agrees Tuesday to go along with staff’s recommendation, it will trigger public engagement work and a public hearing.