BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following is an open letter from the city's poet laureate emeritus to Barrie's mayor and council about plans for a sports field at the Barrie lakeshore.
Dear Mayor and Council;
I have been an Allandale resident for more than two decades, during which I have watched successive mayors and city councils make prudent and wise decisions on expanding and preserving our jewel of a waterfront. I am utterly dismayed with your council’s decision to destroy our wildflower trails in favour of an artificial turf field.
To be clear, I fully support moving the Sea Cadets to the Southshore Centre. Barrie has a long and proud marine history that predates the Nine Mile Portage as Indigenous uses of our creeks and bay are well documented. Moving the Cadets makes sense.
Further, I fully support a new multi-season sports field in Barrie, but not on our waterfront. Sport culture need not run roughshod over our natural cultural inheritance.
From daylighting several creeks, to moving Lakeshore Drive into the old railway lands, to adding non-destructive features like paddle rentals and aquatic “bouncy castles,” previous mayors and councils have successfully worked to expand our waterfront, both literally and with services. They are remembered for it.
Your council is choosing to take a serious and irreversible step backwards. You are permitting a disservice to our waterfront, and the majority of its users, to go forward.
But it is not too late to let our wildflowers and our relatively passive south shore remain.
Reverse this decision, or be remembered as the council that destroyed a last remaining part of our inherited waterfront culture.
Damian Lopes
Barrie
City of Barrie, poet laureate emeritus
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