City councillors have no mandate to grow our cities bigger and uglier, but that is exactly what they have been busy doing up and down the Okanagan Valley for years.
While Peachland city council is asking how we want our beautiful city to grow and develop, they have already approved developments that will radically change our treasured small town lifestyle, and pave the way for the final destruction of what many perceive to be the most treasured real estate in the Okanagan Valley.
The solicitation for feedback from the citizens is about as phoney as it can get, and is nothing but smoke and mirrors to bury the decisions to build another 5,000 homes.
At one time an OCP was the principal and most important planning document created to ensure responsible and orderly land use and development. A solid foundation rooted in a vision for the future.
Today an OCP has become completely irrelevant as a planning tool, and only serves as a vehicle for politicians to pursue their personal and political ambitions.
Abandoning the OCP in favour of sporadic, helter-skelter development has resulted in huge costs to the municipalities, simply because the development of infrastructure becomes an expensive afterthought.
Politicians who insist they have a mandate to arbitrarily re-write the city’s core planning documents have been grossly misinformed.
They have in fact been elected as our trustees. Their only mandate is to serve and protect.
The mould is set to guarantee Peachland soon will be as big and ugly as Westbank, and eventually Kelowna, including a huge increase in traffic, noise, pollution, congestion, illegal drugs and criminal activities not to mention people living and dying in our streets.
The OCP review is also an unusual demonstration of contempt for the rights of the people of Peachland, only to be out-done by Kelowna city council’s ongoing demonstration of contempt for the Simpson Covenant.
The Penticton OCP has been amended more than 90 times, turning it into a fluid document that has created and promoted nothing but uncertainty and confusion.
Planning went out the window a long time ago.
The OCP that currently is under review in Peachland will have absolutely zero value as a planning document, as it will become just another meaningless fluid document that will be changed on a whim, every time an aggressive developer knocks on the doors at city hall.
The bigger loss is the fact that the leaders in our communities, the people with the integrity to perform as our role models and Trustees are not on the ballots.
They simply do not want to be members of our current political culture.
Andy Thomsen, Peachland
