City of Lethbridge employees can’t mess with the sunshine
By Letter to the Editor on November 4, 2021.
Editor:
My wife and I moved to Lethbridge 1 1/2 years ago from the west coast for family reasons and here are a few observation. A lot is being said about the revitalization of the downtown and enormous amounts of money are being spent on fixing the streets downtown, yet the nice large park downtown is still mostly occupied by the homeless and most likely will remain so or even get worse. I’m using downtown Vancouver as an example.Â
The downtown area is mostly empty of pedestrian traffic for whatever reason. Could it be the parking meters? After all, the downtown mall parking lot is always full as are the parking lots at the large stores on the south side.
My wife and I go for a walk around Henderson Lake every morning and here is what we experience: during the spring, fall and summer months we get blasted on a regular basis with water from the sprinkler system as some zones are activated between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Whatever happened to between 11 p.m. and say 6 a.m.?
Good luck trying to walk anywhere in the shaded areas of the trail during the winter months.
Then there is the maintenance, occasionally they do plow the snow on the trail and while they are at it rip up large sections of sod and a few sprinkler heads for good measure.
Talking about sprinkler heads, this past summer I noticed one sprinkler head leaking and a large amount of water running into the parking lot at the main entrance 24/7.Â
This went on for about two weeks so I finally decided to call 311. Well I had to call them twice and after three weeks it was finally repaired, while this was going on the City employee emptying the garbage containers just ignored it as did the employee cutting the grass. He just ran over it with his mower for three weeks.
Now these employees obviously did not feel the need to call some one to have it looked after and I wonder if this is “normal” behaviour of City employees and their supervisors?
I have found during my working years that quite often the attitude of the people doing the work reflects that of their supervisors.Â
There is more, but I want to keep this reasonably short. Anyway, one good thing about Lethbridge, the sun is shining almost every day and no City employee can mess with that.
Barney Feenstra
Lethbridge
-1
a spot on letter. much of the mess we deal with here has to stem from management – and what makes that all the worse is our managers are payed princely sums, no matter their level of competence. you see, here, like too many cities, managers are the product not of expertise and hard work, but are the product of nepotism and networking. glad you enjoy the sun…and did not mention the wind, which often blends the wonderful scents of city sewage with fetid feedlots…ahh, ever so bracing.
This letter is shameful, the parks budget was cut considerably and with those cuts came a reduction in services. The author of this does not volunteer their time to maintain the park so he should not expect others to do the same. The climate here differs substantially from the west coast and there was a drought, therefore you have to water lawns so that they continue to produce green grass. If this individual is so disheartened by the state of our city perhaps they should step forward and take responsibility like a responsible citizen.
So do you help maintain the park? Here in Edmonton we get ignored when we want things done also, and we know if these phoney conservatives starting with Ralph Klein had continued to collect proper royalties and taxes and funding our cities properly, Lougheed did, they would have had ample money to make certain budgets didn’t get cut, as you point out.
No I don’t do anything with the parks other than enjoy them, all I was stating is that you cant get the same level of services if you cut the budget. I don’t want to pay taxes either and I don’t want them to go up so this is the reality we have to live in. We cant rely on volunteers to get work done so we will see the parks receive less attention.
Looks like you got some issues there Barney, I’ll help you out with some. Yes our park downtown does have issues with the disadvantaged, it has for the last 40 years at least. Like it or not they have the same right to the park as you do and as long as no laws are being broken deal with it. On the other hand if you do chase them out where do they go? To the surrounding residential communities, thats where.
On irrigation during the day in parks. My brother was on the city night watering crew during the 80’s and actually moved pipes and heads in the middle of the night. They went to underground irrigation after that. One of the problems being people kicking off heads in the middle of the night. Numerous nights of several thousands of dollars of damage and day watering is the norm.
Lethbridge has the most green space by capita in Canada. We can thank one of our previous mayors for that. The amount that we spend on parks is crazy and with the parks budget being cut back last year I’m not surprised there’s some maintenance issues.
I support your right to complain and hope you work to change things.