RE: Tough Call, Right Choice (May 13 editorial)
Sorry, Neil - you also have this wrong.
You have fallen onto the same trap that everyone does when dealing with single issue outside the framework of cumulative effects. You didn't see the forest for the tree.
This decision has much broader implications than what you describe.
Residents are not looking for status quo - they are looking for mitigation for 30 years of industrial creep. Residents have lived with aggregate-based industrial encroachment on the Nechako benches for decades and have adapted to losing much of the natural surroundings, one incremental cut at a time.
They have always been given platitudes and a rationale that the city needs the gravel and that residents must accommodate. Now the rationale is that the area is mostly industrial so we may as well finish the job.
The decision to continue industrial expansion for purposes beyond gravel extraction and processing was totally unnecessary. This was a gift to the proponents. There is nothing they will do on Otway Road that they couldn't have done on appropriately zoned land elsewhere in the city. They don't need to be on Otway Road while the P.G. Light Industrial Logistics Park sits empty.
City council has shirked their duty to make a responsible long-term land-use decision to reduce an incompatible zoning situation. Instead they have exacerbated it and have left it for future councils, future occupants of these lands and future residents of the neighbouring communities to deal with.
This was a mistake - full stop.
Jim Burbee
Prince George
