Frankly Speaking

Hawthorne Park is popular with neighbourhood residents, as it is a quiet oasis in a very busy part of Surrey between Whalley and Guildford. Surrey council has voted to put 105 Avenue through the park, adding a great deal of traffic and cutting the park in two. While council has made its final decision, citizens who disagree can fill out a form to oppose the action through what is known as the alternative approval process. More than 30,000 forms need to be returned to city hall by mid-September in order to stop the council action. Frank Bucholtz photo In the past 10 years, Surrey council has become more and more remote from the huge number of people it governs. The last time there was a competitive election was in 2005, when Dianne Watts challenged incumbent mayor Doug McCallum and his dominant Surrey Electors Team (SET) which she had been part of. Watts went on to win and eventually corralled almost all the incumbent councillors, SET and otherwise, into the Surrey Firs...

Heritage rarely gets much consideration from Surrey council or city staff, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out how much effort has been recently put into actively pursuing names for roads, districts and geographic features. Much of this work came to fruition with significant changes to Surrey’s original road numbering bylaw no. 1500, which was adopted in 1957. That bylaw eliminated most of the names of Surrey streets, replacing them with numbers. The changes to the original bylaw were adopted by council last summer. The changes recognize that the original bylaw called for named streets - those that are not east-west or north-south in direction. While this has been done in many parts of Surrey since that time, the streets that have been named have usually reflected the desires of developers, not necessarily the city at large. Thus developments like Birdland (in Guildford) and Cowtown (in Cloverdale) came about, using names of birds and cattle respectively. The changes c...

LRT vehicles in Surrey would look something like this. In a March 1 meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at city hall, Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner again emphasized the importance of Surrey’s proposal for two LRT lines, as well as other green infrastructure. It was the first visit ever of a sitting prime minister to Surrey city hall, which demonstrates Surrey’s rising importance nationally. It continues to be one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada. It also suffers from a significant infrastructure deficit, with schools, recreation facilities, roads, parks and transit projects all in short supply. “I wholeheartedly welcome Prime Minister Trudeau’s commitment to work with municipalities to build strong and vibrant communities across the country,” said Hepner. “We had a very constructive meeting and I look forward to working with him and his team to bring positive results on issues that intersect on both the local and national level.” The timing of the LRT line cons...

A series of stories published in The Surrey-North Delta Leader on Friday, Feb. 26 (also available online at http://www.peacearchnews.com/news/370284771.html ) is called “No Fixed Address.” It sheds some welcome light on a challenge which Surrey and many other cities all across North America are struggling with. Most importantly, it features stories and photos of individuals who are or have been homeless. These allow readers to identify with and understand these individuals as people, who face very real challenges. The stories also point out that the road which leads to homelessness, and the road out of it, is complex and involves many very different factors. As is ever the case with human beings, each person’s story is unique. Each set of circumstances is unique. And solutions to this problem for each individual are also unique, which is one of the reasons the problem remains so intractable. Surrey’s response to homelessness has been somewhere in the middle of the pack, whe...