Editor:
Re: City of citations, June 3.
The exponential increase in fines for completely harmless activities is to be expected from Surrey for two reasons.
First, the city government spends money at an appalling rate, so any source of revenue will be milked for all it is worth. Seems like $70,000 worth of fines would just cover a week’s worth of parks and recreation newspaper advertising, which provides us with such hard-to-find information as ‘trees need water’ and ‘in winter, it snows.’
Second, you can’t control people unless you make them criminals. By making almost every trivial activity a bylaw infraction, you gain the kind of control that city council craves.
Back in the ’70s, CBC TV had a program called This is The Law, which consisted of vignettes showing a person carrying out some totally innocuous activities, then being arrested. Panelists had to guess what law was being broken.
They could produce a whole season of that series based only on Surrey.
Ed Beauregard, Surrey
• • •
The City of Surrey has gone way too far with the regulations.
I live by Sunnyside Park, which includes baseball diamonds. There are signs all over the place that you can’t do this, you can’t do that.
Ninety per cent of the time much of the park is not being used. Where are all the kids and adults?
It is really a shame children and people are avoiding going out to socialize in our publicly funded parks.
I don’t buy the statement “there are a lot of people lingering or loitering” after dusk. I never see that situation.
How much of a problem is it really to have to create all of these regulations?
Guy Shaddock, Surrey