Human chain around park.

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ToddT
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by ToddT »

rustled wrote:We will keep volunteering in our community in ways that strengthen and build, and we will continue to focus on the good qualities of all of our neighbours. But we will probably always be disappointed when we see others so easily choosing negativity and protest, and so vigorously encouraging others to follow suit.


You mean disappointed when people disagree with you? The right to protest is something we fought for. Why haven't there been any "pro park" rallies? Or have there been some, but none loud enough to make news?

Sure, the cons have the "save the park" agenda, but you pro's have the "what about the children?" agenda. Surely you can make something resonate with the public. Or do you not have enough support? Is that the problem here?

Light bulb! No wonder you guys don't want a referendum!
XT225
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by XT225 »

[quote="rustled"]We grasp it, XT225. We simply don't agree with your opinion that this small piece of Skaha Park will better serve current and future generations if it's kept in its current state. So again, it boils down to a difference of opinion.

It's really not that difficult to find 900+ people who are willing to get emotional about an issue like this one.

No but it sure must be even harder to try and find even anywhere near 900 folks that are IN FAVOR of putting the slides in that parkland. We are all waiting with baited breath for that stampede of YES folks. Lets go check outside for that 2nd moon in the sky, first. Staying positive means keeping what we are proud to presently own and keeping it free for the public to use and enjoy. Small piece of park, you say? Think again.
rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

ToddT wrote:You mean disappointed when people disagree with you? The right to protest is something we fought for. Why haven't there been any "pro park" rallies? Or have there been some, but none loud enough to make news?

Sure, the cons have the "save the park" agenda, but you pro's have the "what about the children?" agenda. Surely you can make something resonate with the public. Or do you not have enough support? Is that the problem here?

Light bulb! No wonder you guys don't want a referendum!

ToddT, I just don't see the world in black and white.

Just because I'm not opposed to putting a waterslide there, doesn't mean I'm passionate about having one appear there. Why do you feel you must categorize me in that way? It seems to be so you can feel justified in treating me like the enemy. I'm not your enemy. I'm your neighbour.

I don't mind at all when people don't agree with me. What I do mind is when they insist we ought to take sides instead of getting along.

Because that is what I am in favour of: people in our community getting along instead of looking for reasons to bash one another.
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

XT225 wrote: No but it sure must be even harder to try and find even anywhere near 900 folks that are IN FAVOR of putting the slides in that parkland. We are all waiting with baited breath for that stampede of YES folks. Lets go check outside for that 2nd moon in the sky, first. Staying positive means keeping what we are proud to presently own and keeping it free for the public to use and enjoy. Small piece of park, you say? Think again.

I'm not your enemy either, XT225. Just your neighbour, trying to help other members of our community who haven't already made up their minds keep a little perspective on this issue.

The piece of parkland the waterslides will take up actually is quite small. Google maps shows the park area, and if you switch to Earth view, you can clearly see the many existing projects similar in size which have not destroyed the park.

I found it really interesting to swoop north to the Penticton golf course, a place I certainly cannot afford to go. I wonder if I'd have to pay just to walk around there, or to watch others play?

A bit further north is another lease on parkland, Loco Landing. Like the proposed waterslide area, I can go into that part of that park (while it's open) without paying. For example if I take the grandkids there I pay for them to play, but I don't have to pay to watch. Although I do pay to join them for some of the activities.
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
ToddT
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by ToddT »

rustled wrote:ToddT, I just don't see the world in black and white.

Just because I'm not opposed to putting a waterslide there, doesn't mean I'm passionate about having one appear there. Why do you feel you must categorize me in that way? It seems to be so you can feel justified in treating me like the enemy. I'm not your enemy. I'm your neighbour.

I don't mind at all when people don't agree with me. What I do mind is when they insist we ought to take sides instead of getting along.

Because that is what I am in favour of: people in our community getting along instead of looking for reasons to bash one another.


Does anybody else smell waffles?
rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

ToddT wrote:Does anybody else smell waffles?

LOL. I've never been ashamed of changing my mind in the face of new evidence, but I do find I save a lot of energy by not making my mind up firmly until I've taken a careful look. Which is what we did when this fuss was heating up. We looked, looked again, and we couldn't find much to get fussed about.

You'll find all along I've said the proposal looks good, we're fine with them putting waterslides there, we're really happy with them moving the trailer parking away from the lakeshore, we think the improvements to the existing lease area are very welcome. Perhaps you've read into that some passionate support of waterslides? Nope. I like 'em, I do. I like trees very much, too, and grass and green space. And I like my community, and my neighbours.

Above all, I like to keep things in perspective.
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
ToddT
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by ToddT »

I like perspective too. Don't touch the park and build a nice restaurant.
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Fancy
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by Fancy »

So I guess the marina is off the table then?
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rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

ToddT wrote:I like perspective too. Don't touch the park and build a nice restaurant.

Now there's a nice, plain, civilly stated difference of opinion: I'm okay with them touching that part of the park. You're not.

Now, we just need to wait to see what happens when they get through the court case, the archaeological review, and their costing. Then we'll have a better idea of what can be done, what can't, and whether we're back to square one: a new RFP.

And while we're waiting, we can all get along!
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Michael Brydon
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by Michael Brydon »

rustled wrote:Many very good and decent people in our community got caught up in it and spent a great deal of their effort and money supporting Perry's crusade, when they probably could have saved the auditorium if they had instead focused their energy where it belonged.


I am not sure this is true. That is, I am not sure we could have saved the auditorium + gym no matter what we did. By the time a community gets to the point of petitions and flame wars and opposing claims of misinformation and incompetence it is too late. The governmental decision process--with all its staff reports and readings, and incremental commitments--creates enormous inertia. The public consultation that occurs near the end of the decision process is meant to sell the government's solution to constituents. Only very rarely does consultation result in the government going back to the drawing board. So I fear that what rustled says is true: resistance is futile, especially after a certain point.

In my view, this is a structural flaw in the way our governments make decisions. I have talked a bit about this in the past (e.g., TedX Penticton) and even written about it academically. My own small scale experimentation with early-stage public participation in RDOS Area F had led me to two conclusions:
  • people can often agree on fundamental objectives (ends)--a pleasant surprise!
  • people have more difficulty agreeing on specific means, especially in complex environments (where "misinformation" can thrive)
The implication is that governments should start every decision process by getting a rough sense of the community's collective priorities. For example, I have a colleague who starts every discussion with the question, "What do we want to be when we grow up?" Clearly this is not an easy question for a community to answer--there are conflicting visions and inevitable tradeoffs (e.g., service levels versus tax levels, private investment versus public control). But it is not an impossible question to answer.

My prediction (as a scarred veteran of rustled's comparison case): Without some shared understanding of broad community ends there can be no agreement on means. The different sides of this debate will continue to talk past each other. The lawsuit, if it proceeds, might go one way or the other based on some technical detail but will never resolve the underlying conflict to anyone's satisfaction. If a waterslide is built, most will come to regard it as awesome and essential (like the SOEC); if the deal falls apart, no one will really miss it. In 10 years only the committed axe-grinders will remember this thread.
rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

Consultation processes can work well. In the case of Pen Hi, the value questions were asked in the preliminary stages, and input was sought from the entire community. (How to engage people at this point? That's a question for another topic!) The answers about what mattered most guided the committee in coming up with a plan which would save the Ellis and Shatford, the rock walls and the trees out front, and it provided a fairly broad window of time for those who wished to develop a plan to save the auditorium.

Not everything that was valued could be saved, and one of the things that couldn't was the south gym. But the auditorium could have been, because the committee made provision in the plan for that to happen. It needed an outside group to fund it, since the school district couldn't, and this was made plain to the community while there was time to act. As someone who really wanted to help save the auditorium, I was truly disappointed when I went to mall hoping to join up with the group working toward that, and found they had completely thrown their lot in with the gym group. The ship had sailed on that building months before.

In the case of the current protest, as you point out, it would have been a good idea for previous council to ask value questions up front, before putting out the RFP.

But with precedents like the previous Skaha marina lease, Loco Landing, and Coyote Cruises, I doubt it would have occurred to them. And I expect when current council selected a proposal that included redeveloping parking lots and developing what is a relatively small area of "natural" parkland, they were thinking in terms of their election mandate (revitalization), along with those utterly uncontroversial precedents, and that the community would appreciate similar vibrancy at the south end of town.

There's a faction of our community that seems to want to run things from the sidelines, and they get a lot of air time in our local media. Unfortunately, these people are generally unwilling to do what you did: get elected and be accountable for making informed decisions, including the tough and unpopular ones.

Kudos to you, sir, for making the necessary sacrifices in your personal life to work in the glare of the spotlight, serving your community.
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
twobits
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by twobits »

Michael Brydon wrote: The governmental decision process--with all its staff reports and readings, and incremental commitments--creates enormous inertia. The public consultation that occurs near the end of the decision process is meant to sell the government's solution to constituents. Only very rarely does consultation result in the government going back to the drawing board. So I fear that what rustled says is true: resistance is futile, especially after a certain point.



Very astute point MB. Especially the highlighted portion above. How sad is it that the public consultation occurs at the end of the decision making process? Then, as you point out, it is more of a sales pitch soliciting support of a decision made by a few rather than a compromise after the consultation of many. In this case there was pretty much zero consultation with the stakeholder taxpayer. When was water slide ever mentioned to the public as part of the RFP process. Even the Mayor as of Nov 2014 claims to be shocked at it's inclusion.

As to the litigation....I am not so sure that resistance is futile in this case. While there are some parallels between this and your Auditorium effort, the conclusion is not necessarily a cut and paste decision. Not having standing is certainly going to be a defense argument and they could be successful on that but I don't think so here given the overwhelming public outcry that is supported by signature of thousands of taxpayer citizens. I think the court will recognize that there is an argument for standing. Passing that hurdle, there are several other points listed the City might have much more difficulty with. One is most definitely the definition of disposition of Park Lands and consent required to do so. Does a lease including options that runs for the length of essentially two generation constitute a disposition? Precedent will answer that one. What particularly interests me is the recent suggestion that the lands that this proposed development encompass was originally two distinct legal lots that were transferred to the City with a covenant on title that they would forever be public park lands. The decision that the court will have to make if these covenants do in fact exist...... Do the City's current bylaws of allowable use of dedicated park lands fall within what the transfer's of these lands intended as park use? Times do change but I hardly think those covenants 50 or 70 so yrs ago would have been intended to include commercial activity.

And someone please correct me if I am wrong here but was it not a covenant on title specifying "park use" that suddenly ended the hotel on the ballpark because it would have to go to referendum????

Edit to add- I also find it very sad to see people bring up Loco Landing as an example of commercial enterprise on public lands. Give us a break please. To suggest that scrubby piece of land next to the channel and dam is any way comparable to the Lakefront at Skaha needs to give their head a serious shake. That's not even an apples to oranges comparison. It's an apple to kumquat comparison.
Last edited by twobits on Oct 2nd, 2015, 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

I'm sure we've all had some experience with consultation after the fact, and felt it was a waste of time.

But in this case twobits, I'm curious: If you were on council, elected on a platform that included revitalization of the marina area, what would the council have consulted us about? And at what point in the process would you have felt it was necessary to consult us?

Two generations really does seems a bit of an exaggeration. Why is exaggeration necessary?

It will be interesting to see if the judge feels the proposed lease period is too long. Some clarity around that will be good going forward. And it will be interesting to see what covenants were involved on that piece of land, and on other pieces of city land. I wonder if there were covenants on the area leased for the marina?

You sure have a low opinion of the area that was developed for Loco Landing. I have a great deal more respect than that for the area in question at Skaha.
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
twobits
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by twobits »

rustled wrote: I'm sure we've all had some experience with consultation after the fact, and felt it was a waste of time.

But in this case twobits, I'm curious: If you were on council, elected on a platform that included revitalization of the marina area, what would the council have consulted us about? And at what point in the process would you have felt it was necessary to consult us?


Immediately after the responses to the RFP's. Just the ones that met the criteria of the RFP. That would be the initial call for feedback for those interested. Short list it from there. Herein lays the problem. The City chose who THEY thought the best candidate was. They could have been right. We'll never know now will we cuz we were not privy to any other submissions? Beyond that, for almost two years discussions went on in back rooms with the "candidate". Call me stupid if ya like but for something that is going on for that long involving property worth multiple millions of dollars, some updates on negotiations might be in order to get some feed back from the actual owners of the lands. Instead we get a conceptual plan including far more lands than any of the public had imagined (remember the RFP only said the possibility of more lands to the north) with a friggen water slide when the public thought what was being discussed was Marina expansion and a restaurant!. And to this date, we still have no true plans nor any financing agreements in place. The absolute ignorance is that the current incumbents on Council were part of this ongoing discussion and not one of them, nada, thought that this lease should be a topic of discussion for the Nov civic elections! Then just a few months later we see the drawings on the front page of the Penticton Herald. That my friend was a slap in the face of every taxpayer whether they are for or opposed to this lease development. It is a shining example of a total disconnect between the electorate and the elected. While we may have become jaded or even expecting of this kind of decision making at the Federal or even Provincial level, it is totally unacceptable in a community of 35k people. If we can't feel represented by our elected officials at at this level, what the *bleep* is left for us?
rustled wrote:Two generations really does seems a bit of an exaggeration. Why is exaggeration necessary?


What exaggeration? In my mind anything around 40 yrs is two generations. Ask any 41 yr old grandmother.
rustled wrote:You sure have a low opinion of the area that was developed for Loco Landing. I have a great deal more respect than that for the area in question at Skaha.


I don't have a low opinion of Loco Landing at all. I think they are awesome! What I have a low opinion of is your suggestion that the City lands they occupy is a precedent for water slides on Skaha park lands. And unwittingly, by even suggesting that it is no different, you confirm many citizens concerns that this development is just the beginning of the commercialization of our lake front.
Query me this Rust......if you are good with Loco, and you are good with water slides on Skaha.......where will you eventually draw your line??
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

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rustled
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Re: Human chain around park.

Post by rustled »

I wouldn't have expected them to consult us before choosing from the proposals. Is that standard practice elsewhere? Involving the public at that point?

I've already posted what I thought would be the logical stages for any RFP process, but clearly you feel the public should be made privvy to conversations which I think most business people would think should be kept private until agreements are in place. Perhaps Trio will present three or four costed options for us to choose from, as was the case with the Pen Hi reconstruction project. But as I recall, that happened after the contractor was chosen, not while the contractors were bidding.
One would think there are breach of confidentiality rules at play during that time, that our council could be opening itself to a lawsuit by discussing such proposals prematurely, but of course I could be wrong.

At any rate, you may feel you've been slapped in the face, but I certainly don't. I didn't vote for people I thought would pass off the hard work of making decisions on our behalf.

Where is the 40 years coming from? (I've read the lease period is for 29 years.)

It is nice to hear you like Loco Landing, but of course I did not comment regarding your opinion of the amusement park. I was quite clearly referring your statement about the land. Why would you imply otherwise?

It's astonishing to me to see you believe Skaha Park is completely different from the parks at the north end of town, but again, you are quite entitled to your opinion. Here, though, it seems to me that in you are only concerned about this particular encroachment into Skaha Park's green space because it involves water slides. Increasing the size of the boat trailer parking lot, or paving it for a ball court, those sorts of things were fine, needed no consultation with the public?

So it seems your concern is not really about being consulted regarding the use of green space as anything other than green space, it's only about refusing a new lease on the green space?

If so, what is it about a lease for an amusement park that made it okay to handle that in a completely different way than what you expect for the proposed lease involving a water slide? If, as you say it's only because this land is more valuable than that land because, well, it's closer to the waterfront, then why are all of those other uses okay? Why is pavement on the waterfront okay, but not a water slide? It seems rather illogical, but of course you are entitled to see it that way.

As to where I would draw the line, well, within the law, I would take any proposal on its own merit, weighing the pros and cons and the current overall objectives of the community. Isn't that what we elect council to do?

It will be good to have some clarification around which land is under covenant, and what length of lease is "allowed". These clarifications may add restrictions in addition to our bylaws, or surprise us by determining that we can be more flexible than we realized.
There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr.
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