Bowen Bulletin

This could be one of those personality tests “which position most closely matches yours?”

Position #1) Snug Cove is an embarrassment. It should be upgraded to look like the entrance to a prosperous community.

Position #2) Snug Cove is great. In a world where every small town feels the need to make itself over into a model village it’s nice to live someplace that refuses to turn it’s back on the past.

Position #3) Snug Cove is what it is. It’s a ferry terminal. Get used to it. There’s no point in spending a fortune on Government Road because it’s a ferry terminal. If you want to have a village, move it away from the ferry terminal.

Position #4) Snug Cove could be a beautiful village and Government Road could be the heart of it. All we have to do is put the village square where the baseball field is and not be afraid to expand into the parkland on the north side of the street.

Position #5) None of the above. I really like some things about the Cove but really hate others. I’m not a village planner but I don’t think that any of the people who’ve tried to fix Snug Cove are either. They’re either urban planners who want to create urban spaces or they’re part of the “stop all development” diehards who just want to keep us running in circles so that nothing happens.

Quite likely none of these positions really capture how you feel about Snug Cove and whether or not we should do something with it. That’s the interesting thing about the Cove, we love it, hate it and ignore it and we do all three with gusto.

When we return from long trips Snug Cove always appears green and beautiful and welcoming. When we need to get out of a parking spot on a Sunday afternoon it is the most poorly laid out, inconvenient place imaginable. If we have to drop somebody off at the ferry at 7:30 a.m. on a rainy November morning we could quite gladly strangle whoever it is who is supposed to be in charge of traffic control on this island. But there isn’t a chance in the world that we would let that traffic guy do what would have to be done to fix the problems.

Let’s take that as an example. Let’s say that you were the traffic guy and you wanted to reduce the congestion at Cardena while the ferry is loading for the morning commuter traffic and the high school students. The first thing to do would be to buy the corner lot where Chevron used to have their fuel storage tanks. That would allow you to put in a traffic circle and drop off area. Then you would probably want to put in another traffic lane or two between Cardena and the ferry ramp. That would mean widening the road, moving the washrooms and creating a passenger area that didn’t conflict with the traffic. By the time you’d finished you would have spent a several million dollars and most people still wouldn’t be happy. While the big thinkers would be upset that the job was left half done, the diehards would lament the loss of a heritage corner and the only thing that everybody would agree on would be that it cost too much and didn’t work very well.

That in a nutshell is the challenge of trying to upgrade almost anything on Bowen. Because the island’s population has grown from 800 to 3,600 in just 30 years the demand for services has grown faster than the tax base. Luckily there are a lot of services that a lot of people don’t want. This is good, since we can’t afford them anyway. Considering the number of things that we don’t agree on maybe we should concentrate our attention on those things that most of us do agree upon.

Senior’s housing and affordable housing; that’s it. That’s about all that you could say has really universal support in the community. A community hall, a performing arts centre, road improvements, trail construction and Snug Cove redevelopment all have proponents but the housing issue has almost everybody on board. It gives us a compelling reason to actually start to sell or develop some of the Surplus Lands.

You remember the Surplus Lands. We borrowed over two million dollars five years ago to get 39 acres of real estate in and around Snug Cove. It was a great deal and it gave us a fighting chance to build infrastructure for our fledgling municipality. All we had to do was sell a portion of the land to repay the debt and then more, over time to finance community projects. But five years have passed and we haven’t sold the first square inch of it.

Now our failure to sell some land isn’t just frustrating the people who would like to see our debt paid off, our lack of cash threatens to delay the expansion of our sewer lines. And that threatens to delay the Abbeyfield Senior’s Housing project and the associated affordable housing. So, what’s your position on how our Municipal Council is handling this challenge?

Position #1)………