Hang down your heads, city council.
Hang down your heads in shame.
How can council vote in such obscene pay raises for city management and then have the gall to tell us we have to pay a fee for them to clean out their roadside ditches on their property because they’ve spent all our tax money?
Is this the new city hall? A fee for this and a fee for that? What will be the next fee? Of course, we all know once a fee is in, it never goes away, it just keeps getting raised.
I’d like to suggest they rescind those pay raises. Then they’d have plenty of money for upland ditching and drainage.
Mayor Banman kept referring to land that is not being “actively farmed.” Whether land is being actively farmed or not, it’s still in reserve as farm land. That’s the whole point of the Agricultural Land Reserve.
You can’t pave it over and then hope to use it in the future for farming.
The city has hundreds of acres out of the ALR that are zoned for industrial use that has not yet been developed. They do not need land in Bradner.
I’m sure the developer has offered the moon and stars to the Bradner property owners in the ALR exclusion proposal.
I felt badly for the gentleman who got up (at the recent town hall meeting) to say he was one of the property owners in the proposal because he couldn’t grow grapes on his property because of the poor soil. That does not mean the soil is not viable farm land.
What it does mean is it isn’t the proper soil for grapes and you have to choose something that will grow in that particular soil.
People talk about how the Fraser Valley has some of the best farmland in the province. They talk about the 100 mile diet and growing your own food.
If people on the other side of the Port Mann Bridge knew how many acres of land in the Fraser Valley have been taken out of the ALR, they’d be appalled.
Cherry Groves