There’s a better solution to park road debacle (letter to the editor)

Solution?

The recent agreement reached between politicians and the Parks Department over the Silver Lake Park Road debacle is anything but democratic. In fact, isn’t it decision-making protocol like this that we hear about in totalitarian societies?

What happened to We the People, the bedrock tenet of our whole nation’s existence?

Nobody asked for community input on the initial decision to open the road, nor did anyone ask for community input on the latest decision to keep the road closed only on weekends.

Instead, it appears that our crafty politicians on both sides of the aisle are telling us that a compromise has finally been reached, masquerading it as if both recreation seekers and motorists shook hands on the deal. Political ‘b.s.’ has never been so evident.

Closing the road only on weekends does little to the average athlete or elderly senior citizen who had relied on daily outings along the closed road. Joggers, for example, work out daily, so what good does only a two-day closure do for them?

On the flip-side of the one-sided deal are motorists, who tend to stay home on weekends when work commutes and school kid pickups aren’t applicable. So if you’re a motorist, who cares if the road is closed on weekends?

It may not take a rocket scientist to figure out a truly fair solution. In fact, leave it to an 11 year old, my nephew in fact, to actually come up with a democratically fair solution.

“Just make the space wider so that cars and bikes and people can all go there in peace,” said he. And you know, upon closer inspection, the kid may be right.

By pouring a little bit of concrete to make a wider stretch of path for joggers, cyclists, and the elderly, an electrical repositioning of the lamps along the way, and a guard rail barrier between the path and the road, all parties in the heated dispute can be satisfied.

But no, leave it to our politicians for yet another round of suspicious salesmanship in skewing a situation to one side.

Gee whiz, perhaps we should seriously think about electing 11 year olds to office...

(Andrew Ostrowski is a West Brighton resident.)

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