One of the concerns raised since the creation of the Bear Mountain resort is the fate of Western Speedway. The two co-exist nervously, at present. It’s not hard to imagine that the peace and tranquility instilled by golf courses, fine dining, and scenic vistas at the top of the hill does not dovetail well with the excitement of motorsports at the base of the mountain.

We’ve now lost the All-Fun Waterslides, and that’s a shame given it was a popular outdoor recreation facility that our growing community needs. The loss of the waterslides makes me think of Western Speedway, which is on the same property, and it’s future.

Western Speedway pre-exists most everything else out near it and, much like moving next to an airport, the neighbours shouldn’t have any basis for complaint about noise. However, while someone moving into Florence Lake, Setchfield, Hidden Valley, or Phelps really ought to know about Western Speedway, I suspect the people staying in multi-million dollar units at the top of Bear Mountain aren’t briefed on that by travel agents and realtors. I can imagine that the pressure from the top of the hill on civic government regarding noise issues will only grow as the population up there, and the accumulated wealth, grows with it.

Western Speedway is not just a business, it’s an important outdoor recreation facility in a town that’s growing and has need of them. Best of all, as opposed to the millions being proposed to build new sports and recreation facilities at City Center [sic] Park, Western Speedway already exists. And if we don’t have people racing each other in cars on a track in a controlled environment that promotes teamwork and camraderie (many a young adult in Langford has grown up working in a pit crew at Western), do we not risk having them racing each other in city streets late at night instead?

Urban sprawl threatens businesses like Western, as they Read the rest of this entry »

This article is a summary of the higher-profile, more interesting, and more amusing articles from the first week of March. Similar summaries are available for the months of January and February (broken down intoFebruary part 1, and February part 2).

March started off with a bang, with a Raeside political cartoon that a month later is still by far the top-viewed article on Inside Langford.
What if Stew Young’s Lawsuit Against Protesters Failed?

Then, mysteriously the regularly-scheduled early March Council Meeting was cancelled, and Inside Langford readers took a stab (in the comments) at making some educated guesses as to answering the question why the meeting was cancelled. A month later, we still don’t know.
Langford Council Meeting Cancelled… But Why?

After first talking about suing protesters for policing costs, Stew Young followed it up a few weeks later by considering his legal options in regard to another issue. This one was stranger because City Hall expropriated the land, only to then consider legal actions against the owner of the land they’d forced to sell to them.
Litigation Chronicles – chapter 2

Finally, the first week of March ended with an even bigger bang than it began, as Deputy Mayor Denise Blackwell was caught on video “giving the finger” to a protester in Council Chambers.
Councillor caught on tape giving the finger

- Steven Hurdle -