Editor:
I sat both stunned and amazed last Tuesday evening when six of seven members of our Town council voted in favour of re-opening a huge can of worms.
Here’s my understanding of the situation in a nutshell.
With no buyer willing to touch the bankrupt Three Sisters property with a 10-foot pole, the receiver comes up with a scheme to move approximately 1,000 housing units into the unfinished golf course at Three Sisters from an area that is not fully developable anyway because of provincially-mandated wildlife corridor requirements.
Now, the current zoning of the unfinished golf course does not allow housing development in it because the golf course was to buffer the all-important but insufficiently wide primary wildlife corridor that connects Banff park to Kananaskis Country from the truly massive development that will eventually be built below it (roughly the equivalent of the entire town of Banff).
So, as a result of the vote last Tuesday night the Town has committed to reopening a hard-fought agreement that consumed the time and energy of our citizens, businesses and the Town’s administrative and planning resources from 2001 to 2004. The environmental assessment process alone took two years to complete due to the very high stakes regarding the primary wildlife corridor. All that is now “negotiable.”
I am particularly disappointed because there was little apparent need or public support for reopening the past agreement. Further, the Town had no obligation to the receiver to enter into this process to help make the receiver’s lands more “sellable.” I feel that whereas council may have been well meaning (we will have peace in our time) they sadly failed to understand the bigger picture on this.
Jacob Herrero,
Canmore
