Editor, The News:
Re: District poised to repeat mistakes in Albion (Letters, March 22).
This is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. My husband and I rolled on the ground laughing over this. Sold the white sand to Hawaii?
Oh Lordy, Lord, that’s hilarious.
J. Craig Ruthven, you were taken by a master prankster.
I can hear the stories that man told when he got home about the gullible foreigner.
You got taken good.
If you were going to live and work in Guyana, it would have been wise to do a little research on the country.
Guyana has never, ever had white sand on its beaches, which border the Atlantic.
The dirt carried down river by the Amazon flows out into the Atlantic in cycles. Some years there is none; some years there is a lot.
So where the river meets the ocean, the tides force it to curl left and right and the silt is deposited along the shoreline of all the neighbouring countries, creating dark brown clay like beaches.
This soil is extremely fertile and rich, making it great farming land, but not great for tourists who want to sunbathe.
Georgetown, Guyana is also several feet below sea level, so if it were not for the seawall, which is like a huge dike, and were it not for those huge boulders deposited on the shoreline, which function as breakwaters to slow the erosion of the coastline, then in years, or cycles when the silt and brown sand was removed by the tides instead of being deposited, you would have been swimming for dear life instead of sitting on the seawall, being taken for a gullible foreigner.
Guyanese are noted for their sense of humour.
Now that some years have passed, I hope you too can appreciate the joke and laugh at yourself.
Patricia Gibbs
Maple Ridge
Everybody but us
Editor, The News:
Re: District poised to repeat mistakes in Albion (Letters, March 22).
I was 17, and that fellow did weave a great tale.
That’s pretty funny.
For me, though, it doesn’t detract from the power of the imagery, nor does it reframe what is happening in Albion. The area is inherently beautiful and vulnerable, riddled with wildlife corridors and creeks.
We really do not have industry working in our favour. Commercial development is pretty scant, as well, albeit, improving incrementally.
Why tamper with the one thing that we do have in spades, which is the more open, lush, and natural feel, also found in North Vancouver and North Burnaby, where the distinctive West Coast surroundings are both protected and cherished?
Now, that’s something to market to the world out there.
We are not currently building houses for people in Albion. There are few buyers, and the more haphazard cramming and sprawling that we do, like the row upon row of townhouses slated for 240th Street, including, right next to Albion elementary, the less likely it will be that things are going to change, in this respect.
We are building houses to support an unsustainable model, wherein a significant portion of annual revenue comes from building permits and various revenues associated with new construction.
These homes cost the municipality in the long-run because of the costs of servicing the added infrastructure.
The development cost charges merely cover the initial upgrading to servicing.
So, we are building these houses to support previous unsustainable decisions to build houses.
What will this town be left with?
Loose, ill-defined sprawl, without the commercial or industrial tax base to support it.
Chilliwack is different in this respect, and Abbotsford, and Mission, and Langley, and Surrey, and Port Coquitlam.
Okay, everybody but us.
We will have thousands of regretful homeowners who will be saddled with high taxes, plagued by congested commuter routes, drained by denuded landscapes. Many will have no choice but to take a hit, and sell their homes.
This situation is the very definition of short-term thinking. This is fact, not fiction.
Thoughtful, well planned, well defined development, now that’s the way out.
There’s still this elephant in the room.
These homes aren’t selling.
Where’s the trigger point when we say, ‘Let’s slow things down and start rethinking the problem’?
Re: Ernie Daykin re-elected Maple Ridge mayor.
It’s still not too late.
J. Craig Ruthven
Maple Ridge