Kingston waterfront news: January 2008
NOTICE FROM THE CITY about the expansion of the Point Pleasant water treatment plant.
A Public Information Centre will be held at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour Press Lounge from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, January 30, 2008, to allow the public to meet the project team, discuss the study objectives and to receive comments and input.
See also What's behind and under these ugly buildings? from April 2007, and the Urban Area Water Supply Master Plan which is a comprehensive overview with many interesting charts and diagrams.
KEDCO'S KINGSTON ONTARIO WATERFRONT WEBSITE IS BACK ONLINE.
Here's the current home page.
Your tax dollars at work; five-figure dollars worth.
Apparently nothing's changed since last November when this first came to light, then immediately taken offline.
It would be interesting to find out: who is well-served by misleading potential visitors to Kingston?
Note the adult and two kids, in a what appears to be a 15-foot canoe, mid-Harbour at dusk in imminent weather. Seriously, how improbable is that? How wise is that?
International-14 class sailboats haven't actively sailed here for quite some time; all "14" sailboats come here from out-of-town, and they are here maybe one-weekend a year. The boat pictured here is Toronto-based, shown in no-wind, flat-calm conditions, which is insulting, a bit like picturing a slalom skier in a farmer's field.
Underwater here isn't blue, it's green or, if anything, it's dark green. There's blue-water diving, but certainly not anywhere near here.
Adding just one more link-button to that web page looks very expensive. Guess how many files you'd need to touch to add another little box to the left of the canoe.
Is the KEDCO "blue belt" website like other websites KEDCO isn't able to maintain?
Take a guess: what percentage of visitors to Kingston ever get their feet wet in Kingston Harbour? A single-digit percentage? One-in-fifty, perhaps?
Take another guess: what percentage of Kingston residents ever get their feet wet in Kingston Harbour over the course of a typical year?
Do you suppose it might be because of fundamental waterfront inaccessibilities that exist here? Just who is KEDCO trying to kid?
It's one thing to try and lure visitors here, but it's quite another to be overtly dishonest about what we really have to offer.
The movers behind this "blue belt" website, Ross Cameron, Don Curtis, and KEDCO, are the very same folks who thought putting the LVEC on waterfront, expropriating MetalCraft Marine, totally eliminating Kingston Marina, and comandeering part of Fluhrer Park for the LVEC was a fine idea.
A
TOKEN PARK IDEA from a reader. This is downtown Budapest, on the Danube.
At the moment, the plan for Token Park is for a large rubble-rock shoreline, which is inaccessible, ugly, and ubiquitous around here.
In addition to adding a real sense of connection to the water, steps would make Token Park a little bigger, and opens the possibility of using the large, wide-open anchorage as a staging area, or as a competition area complete with viewing stands of sorts.
THE AGM OF PRESERVE OUR WRECKS, KINGSTON is to be held at 1 pm on Sunday, March 2nd in the Ft Henry Room of the Day's Inn at Hwy 401 off Division St.
Light refreshments will be served to members attending.
THE ONTARIO SAILING AGM, held at the Toronto Boat Show last weekend, brought some good news and accolades for sailors from Kingston:
- The Kingston Yacht Club was named as one of three province-wide High Performance Centres and Centres of Excellence. This is an effort to raise the bar and provide a better service to athletes and help them achieve their goals with the ultimate goal of the association to graduate sailors to the National Olympic Team.
- Robert Davis (his biography here) of the Kingston Yacht Club was named 2007 Youth Sailor of the Year.
- Corey Lynam of the Kingston Yacht Club is the 2007 recipient of the Angus (Bud) Roulstone Leadership Award, presented to a (current) certified CYA Instructor/Coach who has shown exceptional leadership in a learn-to-sail or racing program.
AN EVENING OF CANOE STORIES WITH JAMES RAFFAN, is a free lecture sponsored by the Friends of Frontenac Park, on Thursday February 7th in the Wilson Room, Kingston Frontenac Public Library, Central Branch, 130 Johnson Street, at 7 pm. All are welcome.
James Raffan is a respected author and outdoor educator who has written and edited numerous best-selling books, including " Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canadian Canoeing Tradition" and " Deep Waters".
The canoe stories will be about Herb Pohl and Sir George Simpson, two iconic Canadian canoeists who are the subjects of " The Lure of Faraway Places: Reflections on Wilderness and Solitude" and "Solitude and Emperor of the North", his two most recent books, published in 2007
TOKEN PARK CONCEPT PLANS have finally been posted on the City website.
Download the Phase 1 concepts and the Phase 2 concepts.
Observation: You've got to love how this city does business.
- It plans a public meeting with no documents posted online beforehand.
- At the meeting, attendees must queue to have a brief chance to look at diagrams.
- Then attendees must sit-through the orchestrated sales-pitch.
By not posting plans before the meeting, this assures an unprepared and uninformed audience at the meeting, all the better minimize the chance of derailing pre-conceived development plans.
This is really how our waterfront got so ruined: one step at a time. That's how Block-D got stuffed with tall buildings, and that's how the rest of us ended-up with a token-park.
Here we have a "proposed marina building" with no connection whatsoever to the marina. The foot of the nearest dock, on the west-side of the Radisson Hotel, is 245 m away. The foot of the main docks, on Clarence Street, is over 520m away. That's going to be a great marina building, don't you think?
Here is detail of the juncture between Token Park and the stone breakwater that surrounds Confederation Marina. Note the utter lack of vision: there's plenty of usable space on the stone breakwater. Waterfront cities world-wide that "get it" have piers and breakwalls people can walk on. But in Kingston? Nah! Token Park is really a dog park, a place where the condo owner's pets can "go", nevermind that there's acres of great waterfront space out on the stone breakwall.
ACCOUNT OF THE TOKEN PARK (BLOCK-D) PUBLIC MEETING in Thursday's Whig Standard.
Update: Here's a transcript of an item titled Block Park from CKWS-TV News.
FRIENDS OF THE PHOEBE 10TH ANNIVERSARY, Sunday January 27th, 2-4, at the Kingston Public Library, Johnson Street.
Music, Silent Auction, Exhibits, Refreshments, Door Prizes, anniversary gift for every ticket holder.
Tickets $5.00 per person, phone 613-4154 or at the door.
STILL IN PLANNING: This is not new, but a reminder about three waterside 100-meter wind turbines being proposed for the Invista property at 455 Front Road. This item appears on the agenda for the next City of Kingston Planning Committee meeting.
It seems surprising that, in the context of the large Invista plant and the location of the turbines, that a noise report would be required here.
MOVIE TRAILER FOR ST-LAWRENCE II, THE MOVIE
(turn-up the audio).
It's a soon-to-be-released documentary about Brigantine Inc's St-Lawrence II.
Also visit The Brigantine's donations page. In addition to cash donations, they can use all of the follwing things that might be cluttering your home or office:
- laser printer, TV & VCR for classroom, digital slide projector
- sextant, 3-arm protractors (x 4)
- paint, line, flashlights, buckets, scrub brushes, sand paper, and flares.
Update: The sound track in the trailer is Sleepy Maggie by Ashley Macisaac.
A PUBLIC MEETING ABOUT TOKEN PARK (BLOCK D) is to be held January 16, 2008, Memorial Hall, City Hall, 7 p.m.
There's nothing new on the City website other than the meeting announcement. Nonetheless,
Written comments will be received at [email protected] until Friday, Feb. 15.
Here's the only concept ever posted on the Internet.
Here's the wider context, which was never presented in the Token Park process.
THE ORANGE BOWL INTERNATIONAL YOUTH REGATTA RESULTS show Greg Clunies and Robert Davis, both sailing for KYC, finishing 5th and 7th respectively in a 40-boat fleet, with each scoring a bullet in the 9-race series.