Major screwup on Southlands Drive

By Letter to the Editor on July 23, 2018.

It is amazing how council members lose all sense of responsibility, to the city, as soon as they hold a position. The person or people within the planning and development or zoning offices have blown it once again. Take a drive down Southlands Drive, just south of the Walmart, and you will see the major screw up that is being erected as this is being published.

There was a beautiful expensive park, with a big hill, creek, and pond, built just two years ago and now they are ruining the entire look of the area by putting up 24 apartments. These two buildings are located on prime lots immediately on the edge of the park. The apartments will be towering over the beautiful “scenic view hill” that was the focal point of this park and area.

Everyone in this newly built area, within this last three years, were reassured by their contractors, some as little as nine months ago, that the only type of buildings that were to be built along Southlands Drive were duplexes or townhouses with no more than two floors. This major screw up will be way higher than two floors allowed and six or seven times the amount of people and parked vehicles within the same amount of space.

They pushed this development through without giving any notice to the people living within close proximity to this apartment. They say they did give notice, but they did the bare minimum required (only four, and to the contractor not the home owner) so that they would not receive any flack for this stupid decision. The signs for development went up only one day before they started digging and again there was no time to receive feedback to halt this project. I wonder what this developer has over the city, to be able to get something like this approved. Or maybe the city members making the decisions really don’t know what they are doing.

Why does everyone else have to follow so many rules and jump through so many hoops to accomplish anything in this city, while the people trying to run this city just do anything that they want and don’t have to be accountable to anyone?

Loretta Pollard

Medicine Hat

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