I have spoken at length over the years about how compartmentalization is one of the biggest impediments to community success on Bowen.
We have a long-established habit of taking all of our issues and dreams as a community and separating them into separate compartments. Each isolated from the other. Each with its own committee or study group. Each a separate line item at municipal hall.
I liken this operational strategy to trying to play a chess game when you can only see 10 per cent of the board at any given time. Play this way and you may occasionally make the right move, but it was only luck. The rest of the time you will be making mistakes.
The decision to pave in Snug Cove, at this time, is a great example of what happens when you look at infrastructure choices as if they were all separate and not part of an interconnected system.
The following is a list of some of the issues, projects, and wishes already on the table in Snug Cove: ferry marshalling, Cardena intersection and passenger drop-off, additional parking, library expansion, Snug Cove sewer expansion, Cove Bay water expansion, surplus lands development, burying overhead utilities, curbs gutters and sidewalks and multiple ongoing rezoning applications.
All of these items have one thing in common. They will all involve digging up Government Road. Some of these items, such as burying overhead utilities, will involve significant damage to the road.
A few of these items — the surplus lands, for example — have the potential to significantly fund our much-needed Snug cove improvements if we can finally learn see the whole chess board.
So my question is. Why pave now? Seems like we are trying to ice a cake we have not even started baking yet.
It’s a safe bet the final bill will top 350,000. I am not saying do not spend the money. Spend it on something other than short-term window dressing, such as slope stabilization or culvert replacement.
I wish I could report that this is a large misstep by our local standards but I can’t. The list of blunders is long, goes back decades and adds up to tens of millions of dollars wasted of the years.
Perhaps some day we will have the courage see our mistakes and learn from them. As a community we might then choose to open our eyes a bit and embrace the whole. Only then can dreams come true.
Stacy Beamer
