Dear Editor:
Last week City of North Vancouver council voted not to go ahead with plans to build the new recreation centre at 23rd and Lonsdale. Instead, the council voted to develop the shipyard and shipyard museum at the bottom of Lonsdale Avenue.
The Harry Jerome Community Centre serves the people who live here. The rec centre provides one of our pillars in our development as a community.
Lonsdale is becoming so dense in population, yet the rec centre remains as it was some 60 years ago. I swam in that same pool when I was a kid growing up in North Vancouver. I still like to go swimming there 50 years later; however, it pales in comparison to some of the other pools in the Greater Vancouver area.
Why can we not have a decent and modern facility? With all the growth going on, surely the city must feel obliged to offer its citizens a proper recreation facility?
Voting to develop the waterfront will serve a very small and targeted business community. Building a new recreation facility would serve the broader community and provide us with the means to keep fit, active and happy. It also, most importantly, provides children a chance to develop athletically and for families to have fun and play.
I think the city council got its priorities mixed up. Instead of building a new recreation centre that would benefit the greater population of the City of North Vancouver, they have decided to put our tax dollars towards a development that will benefit only a small minority of business interests at the bottom of Lonsdale.
I am asking the City of North Vancouver council to rethink this decision.
Lisa Enquist
North Vancouver
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