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Kelowna Mayor Sharon Shepherd.
Kelowna has gotten support from other B.C. municipalities in its fight to put a multi-use pathway next to CN’s rail corridor through the city.
A resolution calling on the federal government to give the Canadian Transportation Agency jurisdiction over the placement of trails within a railway’s right-of-way was passed today at the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in Vancouver.
The resolution will help the city’s lobbying efforts with Ottawa.
“Other levels of government pay attention to resolutions that come out of these meetings,” said Kelowna Mayor Sharon Shepherd from Vancouver. “It really has implications right across the country.”
Kelowna paid CN $1 million to put the first kilometre of its Rails-with-Trails project along the rail corridor next to Clement Avenue in 2008.
Armed with provincial funding, the city was ready to build phase two from Sexsmith Road out to UBC Okanagan, but CN now says it will no longer grant access to its right of way.
And without changes to federal law, the vision of a cycling and walking path from downtown to UBCO will be dead, as there is currently no avenue to appeal a decision of the one-time crown corporation that is now a private company.
Shepherd said she spoke with representatives from Vancouver Island whose communities have also stymied in their attempts to build trails next to rail lines.
“As a community we were really just trying to achieve a section of trail that is really important,” she said. “Now it seems to be such a bigger issue…suddenly you’re trying to get legislation changed and you’re impacting a whole bunch of other communities.”
Shepherd said the convention also referred a resolution about the disposal of property owned by school districts to the UBCM executive to deal with.
The resolution would have asked the province to require school districts to make surplus land they want to sell, available to local governments. Some UBCM representatives even went so far as to propose the land be made available at no- or low-cost.
Local school trustees had encouraged Kelowna’s representatives to vote against the motion.
“They felt it would maybe be detrimental to their ability to deal with the challenges they have as school trustees,” said Shepherd.
The problem for local school districts is that the provincial government often requires them to sell surplus land to help pay for new school construction. The UBCM executive will now take up the issue with school districts.
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Tags: Kelowna, rail with trails, ubcm, union of b.c. municipalities
