Walk The Beach Kelowna is coming back for a second year.
Organizers of the protest trek along the Kelowna lakeshore, from City Park downtown to Rotary Beach Park in the Mission, say the event is intended to raise awareness about the limitations of walking the public foreshore between the W.R. Bennett Bridge and Mission Creek due to obstacles such as private docks on public land.
“We hope to encourage public discussion on how we can reduce these hindrances and, of course, have fun on our beach,” says Walk The Beach organizers, who will stage the event this year with PLANKelowna.
The walk distance will be almost five kilometres and will take between two to three hours to complete. It will start at 1 p.m. on Aug. 26 at the south end of the City Park promenade, near the tunnel under Highway 97.
For more information contact plankelowna@gmail.com or phone Brenda Bachmann at 250-317-1877 or Al Janusas at 778-215-1312.
“There are some sections of foreshore that we currently can’t walk along. We’ll be bypassing them by walking up to the street to re-enter at the next access point,” says the announcement of the 2018 walk.
According to Walk The Beach Kelowna, The foreshore is the area of beach between the low water mark and the high water mark. That strip of land, Okanagan Lake and the lake bottom belongs to the province, so they are all public property.
The high water mark is usually the boundary between public and private property, which is why the group wants the province and/or the city to install small permanent signs at intervals along that line so pedestrians don’t accidentally trespass onto private land.
But it also wants members of the public to know they are allowed to walk unrestricted along the foreshore.
“When lakefront property owners apply to (the province) for permission to build a private dock on public property, one of the conditions the province imposes on them is they must not restrict public access to the foreshore,” says Walk The Lake Kelowna.
Related: Beach access walk planned
It says this year, the area it is focusing on is between the Bennett Bridge and Mission Creek. Very few of the higher docks have the required stairs for the public to cross them, and without the steps the docks become major barriers.
In a number of locations other obstructions, like walls and fences, have also been installed.
Walk organizers also want more provincial natural resource officers hired to enforce the rules in the Kelowna area.
It says its priorities are:
• Construction of a planned small public park linking Strathcona Beach Park and Royal Avenue Beach Access.
• Repair and improvement of the existing public walkway along the lakeshore north of Maude Roxby Wetland.
• Construction, in a basic form, of the long-awaited lakeshore park near Cedar Avenue, with features added at later dates as budgets allow. The city has owned a row of 12 waterfront properties on the site of the future park for more than 20 years.
• Having the City of Kelowna resume buying properties that are adjacent to existing lakefront parks when they become available. It says costs could be reduced by selling the road-side part of these properties and adding just the lakefront portion of the property to parks.
• Having the city provide, and permanently install, small signs at the high water mark of waterfront properties so beach walkers don’t inadvertently trespass onto private property.
• Completion of the missing sections of the Abbott Street recreation corridor multi-use path, south of the Kelowna General Hospital.
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