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. 
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. 
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. 
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