Skateboarders face move to farmland

A popular skatepark in West Kelowna could be relocated onto farmland next to an old sewage pond to make way for the municipality’s new city hall.

City officials want to shift the skateboard park, built only five years ago at a cost of nearly half a million dollars, from northwest of the JohnsonBentley swimming pool to a location on the building’s southeast side.

But the proposed 1.2-acre site is within the Agricultural Land Reserve, and next to a settling pond used as part of an early sewage treatment system, and so provincial approval will be required.

“Due to a lack of available lands in West Kelowna, the existing skate park site is the only viable location for a city hall,” Paul Gipps, the municipal manager, writes in a new report.

To try ensure the provincially-designated farmland is approved for a relocated skateboard park, Gipps says the city would create a permanent farmer’s market on the site.

Gipps also says the city would put up some signs about the history of agriculture in the proposed city hall, as part of an “agricultural learning centre.” And new directional signs would be erected to point people to nearby wineries, he says.

Such measures, Gipps suggests, would help enhance agriculture in West Kelowna and offset any concerns about the loss of the land currently designated for agriculture next to the swimming pool.

While classed as farmland as a result of the creation of the Agricultural Land Reserve in the early 1970s, the site proposed for the relocated skateboard has “not historically been used for agricultural purposes,” Gipps says.

It has poor soil, Gipps says. Its current use is mainly as a parking lot for nearby Memorial Park and amphitheatre, which were built upon a sewage treatment facility’s settling pond that was decommissioned after the swimming pool opened in 1987.

Gipps acknowledges the skatepark, built in 2016 at a cost of $440,000, including a $315,000 grant from the federal government that was also put toward construction of the amphitheatre, is “well-utilized”.

But he says the skatepark’s relocation, a cost estimate for which is not provided in his report, is necessary to free up land for the new city hall. Council last month awarded a nearly $1 million design contract for the city hall.

In the mid-1980s, the Agricultural Land Commission approved construction of the swimming pool on lands that also had a provincial farmland classification.

Although the city has not yet formally filed a nonfarm use application with the ALC that would allow for the skatepark’s relocation, the provincial agency sent a letter to the city in December that says the proposal “is consistent” with its previous decisions.

Members of West Kelowna’s agriculture committee will be asked at a meeting next week to endorse the city’s application to relocate the skatepark. But a decision on whether the application is sent to the ALC rests with city councillors.