Editor, The News:
As a community, we are not happy with what the district is planning for our street.
In October or November, the district sent out a letter to advise the residents of Lorne Avenue of plans to place a sidewalk down the street to make it safer for the children to walk to school.
This idea was brought forward from Hammond elementary and the RCMP.
We are also concerned about the safety of the children who walk the road to school, so we attended an open house at the municipal hall to view the project.
Upon seeing the district’s idea, our concern is that the road needs to be brought up to better standards to accomplish this project.
At the time, the drawings showed what we thought was a curb and gutter sidewalk down both sides of the road, with a raised sidewalk. We were then advised that the district only intends to place the sidewalk down one side of the road, which would have been OK.
But the district said it would head back to the drawing board with the input it received, and that it would delay the project.
This past January, we received another letter and there was an ad in the paper inviting the residents of Lorne Avenue to view the project at the municipal hall.
Myself and others from the street, as well as residents in the area and the Hammond school PAC leader attended and were shocked to see that the district had changed its plans. It wants to remove the curb and gutter in the project and only place a little wider strip of asphalt down the edge of the road and paint a one-and-a-half metre white line to separate the children and the cars that travel down Lorne Avenue at sometimes extreme speed. This, despite the fact the majority of area residents told district staff to not waste our tax dollars and do the job right.
Staff then tried to set up a meeting with area residents on Friday, at 5 p.m., to discuss both the sidewalk and the drainage concerns.
I don’t get home from work until after five, and although I was informed of the meeting, others were not.
Still, a group if residents did show up for the meeting, but no one from the district did.
All we want, as residents of Hammond, is to be treated the same as the rest of the residents of Maple Ridge and have our tax dollars spent to do the best possible job on any project, not just this one.
We are tired of being treated as second class citizens.
So I hope the staff move quickly to resolve this problem and get on with doing it right for the sake of our children.
Eric Phillips
Maple Ridge