I want to play “Devil’s Advocate” today. I want to suggest an alternate view.
Last week when we attended the “Charrette”, we were told that Cowichan bay Village was a problem that had to be solved. We were reminded of the parking issues, the safety issues with the highway that runs through our Village, the congestion, the fact that it’s hurting small businesses along the strip, and the idea that somehow a new way of thinking had to be embraced in order to fix things.
We were told that Cowichan Bay Village had to “progress”, and that development, refinement and to some degree expansion (of parking at least) was the answer.
What if it were not.
What if all the problems at Cowichan Bay Village were the RESULT of development, refinement and expansion? What if at the recent meetings, we were being sold more of the poison rather than the antidote? What if the entire idea of “fixing” Cowichan Bay Village as suggested to us last week, is “more of what got us here in the first place”?
You know as well as I do, that clutter will always fill every available space it’s allowed to get into, that moving from a small house to a larger one is easy, but that the opposite is more difficult. Why? Because of all the “stuff” we accumulate as we go along. Same goes with parking. If I waved my magic wand and doubled the parking here, in three years we’d be back at the table once more, with parking problems.
If we look at Cowichan Bay Village as a gas stove-top pressure cooker, we can imagine that local, business and tourist activity is the steam that builds up inside the pot. (We can imagine the citizens who live in Area D, both on land and on the water as the fire under the pot, burning steadily.) We can imagine that the “parking problem” the limiting factor in how much tourist turnover there is in the Village is the safety valve. The hissing noise that comes from the safety valve, can represent the “Parking Problem Complaints”. If there are complaints, we know the safety valve is doing it’s job.
If we hold down the safety valve, (cram in more parking, provide alternate parking or begin busing people in) the pressure inside the pot will get higher. More business activity. More activity over all. If we hold down the safety valve too long, the pot will explode. Our Village will lose it’s character and charm, become a nautically themed commercial strip just like everywhere else. We will destroy our pressure cooker and put out the fire on the stove. If we leave the safety valve alone, it will always ensure a set level of activity, will always reliably govern the amount of pressure that builds up.
I suggest, as “Devil’s Advocate”, that the parking problem comes as a direct result of the slow progression of development, and that a spurt of more of the same, but now with enhanced features, costs and hoop-la, is the equivalent of replacing the entire safety valve with a brass plug. You do this while canning preserves, and you’ll destroy your kitchen.
You do this in Cowichan Bay Village and you will destroy it as well.
So maybe the answer to our problems, is to more or less leave the safety valve alone. We could adjust it a little by perhaps encouraging long term parking on the far side of the road only. Anyone who wants to park for more than an hour, parks across the road or away from the business area. Make it a “Good Village Citizen” thing to do. That would leave parking on the business side of the road, for all the turnover. People coming and going, popping into shops for a bit of cheese or loaf of bread on the way home, or into a cafe and then gone after lunch would have ready parking, within the limits set by the pressure cooker valve.
The residents would be happy (some not, but we should all work together to be good citizens) the business people would be happy and do a wee bit more business, and we could toss all the nonsense of last week, which seemingly nobody wants, into the bin. Pity about the 140k though.
