My Little Town.

If your town is anything like my town, the quality of the decisions made by your elected representatives leaves something to be desired. Oh, they get a lot right, but everyonce in a while they bow to some special interest group and royaly screw things up!

Here is a letter I had to send to our local paper this morning:

Sir:

A Tale of Two Cities;

Once upon a time in a land far away, (Sarnia) there was a developer who wanted to build a nice high-rise condominium on the waterfront beside Centennial Park.

People who lived nowhere near the development got up in arms and claimed that the building would block their view of the river, even though they didn’t usually stand on that particular spot to begin with.

One brave soul (Me) went before City Council and suggested that if someone wanted a good view of the river from that section of Downtown, they should just move left or right about a hundred feet and then they could look at the scenery all they liked.

The nay-sayers won the day, the condominium wasn’t built, and for the next twenty-five years everyone had an ugly plywood wall (fence) filled with graffiti to look at instead of a nice new condominium.

Much the same might happen here in beautiful London. The Sifton property is not in the way of anything and doesn’t block anyone’s view of the park so what is the big deal. I think it would be a lovely building.

Of even greater consequence is blocking development of an $80 million dollar industrial park because some idiots at planning committee say “we have enough land.”

This is insane, the city made a grave mistake by screwing up the “Wonderland Gardens and Restaurant” thing and it looks as if history is about to repeat itself.

Your "concerned" scribe;
Allan W Janssen