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
