Another oddball move by Cobourg Council – a bureaucratic answer to a simple question, which will muddy the waters and bury local activism.

In another website – The BurdReport – a post (click here) outlined the struggles of thirty years of trying to establish a Nature Park and environmentally sound practises for the preservation of the land at the Harbour known as the West Beach and Headlands. Finally this year a motion was introduced to establish a Task Force to investigate and make recommendations to Council about the issue.

However even more recently the Cobourg Council found itself in the middle of a Citizens’ uprising about the rezoning and sale of the former CDCI West sports field. That Citizen Rage resulted in the deferring of the problem until a later date but it shows that Citizens care about what happens at the waterfront and its environs.

But back to the neutering of Activism. With the expansion of the terms of reference of the Task Force setup to investigate the Nature Park – seven local people on a Task Force into a Parks and Recreation Master Plan. Read the Director’s report here. The two topics a Nature Park Task Force and a P&R Masterplan are two completely different animals. One is ‘site-specific’ and the other is a long term project. Read the final Motion here look for item 9.1 on the agenda

These two dissimilar projects require different Citizens for each one. The Nature Park needs dynamic interested people who want to see the development of a Park. The people needed to study a MasterPlan  are of a completely different interest set. The Activists who want to work on the Nature park are mainly interested in the Nature Park and probably would not want to commit to a long term bureaucratic study. These people signed up for action not a Consultant driven bureaucratic MasterPlan.

As we saw with the Rezoning of the sports field and the reaction to it we have intelligent and ‘too clever’ people at City Hall. I can just hear the discussion at the “Directors’ Meetings” now. “Let’s kill two birds with one stone – blunt the Activists and get the Masterplan done at the same time!” A very clever technical move that they hope will dissuade the Activists to get involved.

This how to counter that move – let the Activists volunteer for the Task Force, who will then insist on the Nature park plan being done first, so that it can be incorporated into the MasterPlan. The activists resign and then let the people who like meetings build the Masterplan.