Editor:
What on earth is Sechelt council thinking? ("Council votes to lose parking," Coast Reporter, July 30).
To further reduce the width of the seawalk in Davis Bay is the worst of all possible solutions. Do council members ever walk there?
The Davis Bay seawalk is a treasure of the Sunshine Coast, drawing residents by the hundreds, and also attracting tourists. It is the finest stretch of urban waterfront on the Coast and is busy at all times of the day. Already the path is too narrow. Anybody walking there will know that only two people can walk abreast and, when you meet others, somebody has to step out into the adjacent parking spaces. Many of the walkers there are seniors, so the benches provide a good place to stop and look at the view and are also necessary resting places. The flowerbeds provide the setting that makes the waterfront so attractive to everybody living on or visiting the Coast.
To desecrate the waterfront and take away the property of all those hundreds of people who use it is an act of massive expropriation. We, private citizens, are to lose what is ours.
Think again, council. There are other solutions. As one councillor suggested, you could drop the whole project. Do we, yet again, have to yield to the endless demands of the automobile? I hoped we had got past that limited way of thinking.
What is needed at Davis Bay is a wider esplanade, not narrower, more seats and more flowerbeds. I urge everybody to contact mayor and council to object to this bad decision and to ask that they revisit, review and reverse it.
Paddy Blenkinsop
Sechelt
