With the introduction of a new parks and recreation master plan, park dedication bylaw and parkland protection and use policies at city council this week, a three-year-long controversy may, at last, be laid to rest in Penticton.
There will be some for whom the rule changes aren’t enough, or suspect there are still hidden agendas. Nor does this mean we should stop paying attention to what city hall is doing in our parks. But to paraphrase Churchill, this may not be the end of the battle but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
It was just about three years ago that Penticton city council decided — with little public consultation and against community opposition at a public hearing and in large rallies — to approve a deal that would have seen a chunk of Skaha Lake Park leased, for 29 years, to a developer who wanted to build a waterslide complex. That set off two years of opposition, divisiveness and legal challenges that eventually resulted in the City of Penticton paying penalty fees in order to cancel the deal.
There are two lessons to be learned from how council handled this. First, you can’t dismiss opposition as irrelevant, no matter how much you think they are wrong. Council learned that lesson after trying to dismiss people opposing the development as a vocal minority, and arguing there were as many people at the rallies that were protesting in favour of the waterslides.
The bigger lesson, though, was the failure of the city council and staff to fulfill their obligation to communicate with the community. Secrecy, non-disclosure agreements and a short timeline laid a fertile ground for not only the protests that followed but the accompanying conspiracy theories and division within the community.
As in so many cases, good communication that flowed both ways might have prevented this situation from blowing up into the long battle that it did.
