Community reaction to the plans announced last week to place a middle school or elementary school on Grimston Park has been immediate and understandable. Not surprisingly, with a civic election going on, VOICE New Westminster’s school trustee candidates have been asked what their position is on Grimston Park.
The VOICE school trustee candidates have been listening to all of the viewpoints being expressed in our community and have already spent a considerable amount of time discussing the subject together.
Quite simply, a VOICE New Westminster school board would never have put the Grimston Park proposal on the table in the first place. The options for Grimston Park were put on the table without due process as part of a back room deal between the city and the school board. All VOICE school trustee candidates believe that “options” should flow from public consultation and not the other way around as has been the case with the Grimston Park proposal.
The VOICE school trustee candidates feel that presenting the public with a single site option was, in fact, not an option at all. We know that there are other viable options that have not been brought forward and this was publicly acknowledged at the meeting held in the NWSS library on Tuesday, November 4th.
Like our fellow New Westminster residents, the VOICE school trustee candidates want all options brought forward and pursued with expedience, in open consultation and with full information being provided to the public for their consideration.
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I'm looking forward to seeing the ideas that were generated from last Tuesday night's meeting. Jim Alkins turned the meeting into a bit of a workshop session and people divided into small groups to brainstorm options for how the district can move forward with its facility needs. This is the sort of open consultation that should have taken place months ago.
It was really interesting to ciruculate around the room and listen to the ideas that were being generated by people; and a lot of these ideas sounded very feasible.
I urged John Woudzia and Ian MacLeod (the public relations consultant associated with the capital project) to photograph all of the worksheets and post them unedited and unfiltered on the school district website so that everyone could have an opportunity to view them intact and consider the ideas.
I also had an interesting chat with Jim Wolf and the archaeologist from Golder Associates. They were able to answer a couple of questions I had relating to the proposed cemetery area. They indicated that, once the cemetery area was legally defined and agreed upon, the regulator might allow the cemetery area to be "capped" which could potentially make the area available for some uses. Capping is apparently an accepted practice and it could involve adding several feet of new earth over the entire cemetery area which would protect any human remains from further disturbance. In theory, the regulator might then allow the new surface created by capping to be used for playing fields, something that would greatly increase the usable space available on the high school site.
What I don't understand is why this sort of information hasn't been brought forward with any vigour before now... So far, all I've heard being talked about is how the cemetery is an insurmoutable obstacle that reduces the usable area on the site.
As always, I have lots of questions and I want to know more. Lots of people are in the same boat. But, as is typically the case in the New Westminster school district, there are no written reports that we can pick up and read that would lead to fully informed public consultation.
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