Dear Editor,
Kudos to town council on achieving redevelopment goals for Lakeshore Drive, Centennial Park and the downtown business area!
Lakeshore Drive is now a narrow roadway, as planned, replete with large ill-constructed speed bumps. Parking from 33 to 40 Street is gone. Centennial Park is now mostly a day use picnic area and dog-walking park. The weekly cottage rental industry has been all but eliminated through oppressive bureaucracy, and with it paying tourists that, council sometimes complains, cost more in support services than revenues generated. Again, all as planned.
Now that tourism numbers are flat or even slumping (at least partly due to ill-advised aspects of redevelopment) with commensurate cost savings, one might expect council to be in a celebratory mood.
Not so. Now we have a curious situation in which council plans to spend $60,000 for a study on how to attract tourists. The question is does council want more tourists or fewer tourists? Apparently the answer is ‘more’ because council recently spent $25,000 dumping sand on provincial property to create a faux beach!
Dale Mannix (SL News, July 25) is right on regarding one aspect of Sylvan Lake tourism. Clean out Sylvan Creek so lake levels can drop to the historic average levels and Sylvan Lake’s spectacular mile-long family beaches will reappear. Maybe even tourists, despite the aggravation of scarce parking, frustrating roads, overzealous policing and lack of downtown shops and attractions.
Town council has no one to blame but itself if Sylvan Lake tourism is sagging. The Lakeshore Drive and Centennial Park redevelopment projects illustrate the folly of settling for form instead of function when building infrastructure; of swallowing fancy consulting concepts rather than keeping customers’ (end users) wants and needs in mind. Make things fun and easy to use and people will come; make visitors’ experience inconvenient or unpleasant and they’ll spend their money elsewhere.
Taxpayers rightly expect council to make up its mind and declare whether its focus is on encouraging more tourism, cost cutting at the expense of tourism, or futuristic pie-in-the-sky visions of grandeur for Sylvan Lake. Until the decision is made, hold the $60,000 studies.
Roger Smith,
Sylvan Lake