Kelowna.com - Kelowna. Right Now!

By Chuck Poulsen

We’ve been had again by the artista and their friends on city council.

First there was the butt end of a pine cone for the city’s new logo and now we have to look at the Tribute to Razor Wire that sits by the Bennett bridge.

“The clean lines and graceful curves will speak to a modern and optimistic community,” the artists pronounced when their design was approved by City Council.

It looks more like a welcome-home sign to convicts.

The city has paid 80 per cent of the $200,000 project. Expenditures are approved by council, based on recommendations from the pretentious boneheads on the Public Art Committee.

Most members of the art committee are artists, although it’s not clear how many make a living at it without government grants. It also includes a few “patrons” of the arts, just to make sure the common folk aren’t part of the decision-making.

The committee should include: a plumber, cop, sales clerk, computer expert, heavy duty equipment operator, nurse, and – let’s go completely outside the box here – even a lawyer so, if necessary, we could have someone to sue city council for assault on our senses and wallets. No more wine-sipping and canapé-nibbling at the committee luncheons.

The next expenditure on public art might be for something that decidedly isn’t abstract. Check pictures of Rome or Paris for some ideas.

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City council is again trying to boss us around, led by council’s foremost social engineer, the imperious Michelle Rule.

She wouldn’t sign on for a bylaw against cell phones in cars because it didn’t include hands-free phones.

If you Google cell phone and driving, there will be 16 million reports or comments to choose from.

As usual, there will be research that supports any and every point of view.

A new study from Virginia Tech found that it is 23 times riskier to text while driving compared with just talking on a cell.

This is hardly surprising but I didn’t know that people text while driving, in such large numbers that Virginia Tech could turn the observations into a statistically legitimate study.

Comments Consumer Report: “Dialling the phone or just reaching for a phone was associated with about six times greater risk, and talking or listening to a cell phone was just 1.3 times as high as non-distracted driving.

“Those drivers who were texting had their eyes off the road for the longest time—nearly five seconds when compared to other phone distractions. This equates to a driver covering a distance the length of a football field at 55 mph without looking at the road.”

As anybody with children knows, we’ve covered the lengths of many football fields trying to break up fights between kids in the back seat.

Solicitor-general Kash Heed is considering if B.C. should restrict or ban the use of cell phones and other electronic equipment in cars.

That is the level of government that should address the problem, not the busy bodies on City Council who recently overstepped their boundaries by banning pesticides that are perfectly legal in Canada.

Couldn’t council and Rule do something useful within their own bailiwick and stop this agenda of knowing what’s best for us? For instance, they may look at ways to lower property taxes.

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There are 70 fire watch towers in B.C. None are in the Okanagan. Maybe we need one.

Governments have cut back on them to save money but a good set of eyes with binoculars can be an effective and cheap fire safety measure.

The Ministry of Forests said Monday there is plenty of air traffic in our current situation to spot fires. But the spokesman also conceded that most of those planes don’t fly at night.

The promise of space satellite fire detection hasn’t worked out. Fires detected from space are already so large they have already been seen from the ground.

There are several mountaintops from which fire starts could be observed in the Central Okanagan, especially in the wee hours of morning.

We might all sleep better if we knew there was someone up there watching over us.

Trivia fact of the day: The earliest known fire lookout was on Mount Masada, west of the Dead Sea, in present-day Israel. It was built 2,000 years ago by King Herod’s army in Palestine to protect against his enemies who were burning his empire.

You can reach Chuck Poulsen at Needlepoint@shaw.ca

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Chuck Poulsen, City Hall, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.