Maintenance overkill along South Langley roads

The roadside verges have been damaged and thousands of reptiles and amphibians have been killed.

Editor: In my area of South Langley, the Rural Road Maintenance Team is in the midst of a far too generous  taxpayer-funded spending bonanza.

It started in the late winter, long  before any visible grass growth, with “trimming” of the roadside verges. The next activity is the scouring of the ditches involving chopping of vegetation, chewing up the top couple of inches of dirt and massacre of every frog, toad, salamander and snake that lived there.

Each ditch warranted a pass on both sides of it and sometimes another up to the private  property fence line. The final deed is the irregular gouging of often visually pleasing verges in the name of removing any grass sod with the temerity to grow above the level of the road surface.

So  after all this action, five or six passes on each side of every  road  with diesel-guzzling heavy equipment belching noxious fumes, we end up with more air pollution, exuberant new vegetation growth in the ditches, ugly gouges in what were nicely owner-maintained grass  verges and the murder  of thousands of harmless amphibians.

Is this  value for taxpayer dollars?

Margaret Ormston,

Langley

Langley Times