Dear Editor:
Re: Wright defends himself, Sept. 14, The Record. The mayor's self-proclaimed mantle of being "visionary" sent many of us running to a dictionary. com wherein we discovered treasure - a plethora of definitions that we ask the mayor to choose from to clarify his statement. We list a few of our favourites below:
1. "Given to or characterised by fanciful, not presently workable or unpractical ideas views, or schemes." The hastily unveiled Sixth Street overpass and Front Street encasement comes to mind, a scheme that cannot be accomplished without TransLink cooperation. The mayor's credibility with those folks evaporated with the United Boulevard fiasco. It was designed to bring trash to feed the Royal Columbian Hospital power plant but is now possibly redundant if spurned Coquitlam officialdom get their way to relocate the hospital.
2. "Given to or concerned with seeing visions." Not sure how the mayor and his smoked-filledroom cronies create blurred visions without either public consultation or calculating the ultimate cost to taxpayers.
3. "Purely idealistic or speculative: impractical; unrealizable: a visionary scheme." This relates to the bicycle/pedestrian bridge to Queenborough. It is "impractical" as only the most hardy folks could scale the 10-storey ramps to use it. It is "unrealizable," at a cost of $20-plus million in its current location and configuration, within the $10-million development assistance compensation funding set aside for its realization. The positive impact is speculative when it appears to wreck or impinge on the children's submarine park.
4. "A person of unusual keen foresight." Before the mayor seizes on this one as saving grace or face, we remind the reader of his "vision" of the Pier Park, dubbed by some as "Wayne's Wharf," half a park to be finished neither on time nor on budget with no practical link to access it.
5. "A person who is given to audacious, highly speculative or impractical ideas or schemes; a dreamer."
This last definition shows that the mayor, like "Ozymandias" in the Percy Shelley poem, may have put a stone foot in his mouth in choosing the word "visionary."
The pedestal on which that poem's foot fragment stood bore the inscription "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!"
We mighty voters do look at your visionary works, Your Worship, and despair the tax increases necessitated by such "visions."
E.C. "Ted" Eddy, New Westminster
