Dear Editor:
Well it is finally over! I appreciate the difficulty our council had agonizing over this decision.
I don’t begrudge any of their positions although I think it is unfortunate we turned this project away.
After listening to each of our councillors speak on Tuesday night, what I took away from this was that our council collectively thought this was the wrong land use in the wrong location.
While that is a reasonable position, it is completely unreasonable not to have made that decision in 2016 when the application was first presented.
The land use didn’t change, the location didn’t change and the swell of protest didn’t change from the first proposal back in April of 2016.
Instead of having the fortitude to decide whether this land use was appropriate in December, they sent the developer out spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on road designs, water designs, sewer designs, storm drainage designs, additional traffic studies, environmental studies, water source studies and updated building designs…when none of that mattered in the final decision.
Our council also put the community through an additional 14 months of angst, protest, updates at every council meeting, multiple letters to the local newspaper and untold grief.
I hope that should any future developer have the stomach to propose something for Summerland, that the council of the day have the decency to decide the land use question before putting the developer, staff and the community through months of study, design and grief.
What a colossal waste of resources.
Ian McIntosh
Summerland