Dear Editor:

This is the letter I e-mailed to all councillors and the mayor.

Dear Mayor and Councillors:

We are profoundly disappointed that you want to change the Official Community Plan in a major way. 

Many of us attended committee meetings and voiced our opinions over the course of two years to develop this plan. 

Our town also paid for an able consultant.  Finally, the OCP was accepted by most Summerlanders.   

We thought that we agreed that the Urban Growth Area could be considered for expansion only every five years along with a comprehensive review of the OCP.  Ecological considerations were to be respected. 

Now you want to change the rules so that you can be able to make major changes in the OCP any time you feel like it. 

That’s disgusting and unfair to the citizens of this town who really care about the OCP.

We do not want to be another sprawling Westbank or Kelowna. 

We thought that infilling close to our town’s centre was to be the plan, not Mr. Murphy’s huge unserviced parcel quite far from the town’s centre. Growth in an unserviced area makes everybody’s taxes go up for more infrastructure.  Larger towns have a higher mill rate. 

As Summerland has grown, we have all seen our taxes rise in a major way.

Where do you imagine that the water is going to come from for more huge developments?

The best climate scientists in the world are predicting hotter, drier weather for our region.

Because of pine beetle kill-off in the watershed, trees won’t be holding back the snow moisture for a long enough period, that is, if we get much snow.

We’ve been on water restrictions for four years. The lake is finite as a supply. It didn’t fill to capacity this year, and the turnover of water is about 55 years.  Thirsk Dam didn’t fill as well as hoped either. 

Look up the Aral Sea on the Internet.  It was a much larger body of water than Lake Okanagan. But it has shrunk to a third of its size from overuse, and the land around it has turned to desert. If we lose much of our lake, our climate will change, too.

A growing world population plus lack of water does not bode well for our future food supply. 

Some seem to believe that large farms are the future. That doesn’t jibe with what scientists and agriculturists are telling us. In the future, we are told, we won’t be able to transport food from great distances so easily. That’s why we should be very protective of our agricultural land. It has been shown that smaller farms usually are more productive and ecologically friendly than the huge ones.

Do you care what the citizens of Summerland want? Was the OCP design worked on and ratified in vain, only to be overturned by a tiny new team not respecting Summerlanders’ wishes? 

Marilyn Hansen

Summerland