City councillors have a love for highrises

DEAR EDITOR:

Re: Laura Doncom’s concerns about city councillors voting to give up the old RCMP detachment property on Doyle Avenue to a developer for a highrise condominium building before the Cultural Facilities Master Plan has been completed. (It’s not too late to save Doyle for arts centre, Sept. 24):

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 councillors have an obvious fetish for tall buildings — highrises, skyscrapers, 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 from 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.”

We also have a unique noise culture in Kelowna, thanks to a city council that 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 reflective of our current tone-deaf city councillor’s sensitivities, it would have to be a set of chrome-plated flowthrough mufflers.

Andy Thomsen, Kelowna