There are many places that can serve to anchor a community: its main street, its city/town hall, its library, its schools.
But perhaps most important are its parks.
Sometimes serving as a method of conserving a significant wildlife area, designating a space as a park can also make that space an important community gathering place — a spot where people meet their neighbours, where they celebrate their community’s organizations, their artists and volunteers. A park can also provide a community identity.
Without Parksville Community Park, the city would still have amazing beaches and beautiful scenery, but there would be no single place for the community to gather and wonder at that amazing waterfront.
But with these spaces available, parks can be what tie a community together.
In the summer, Parksville Community Park hosts events almost every weekend with the major event, the sand sculpting competition and exhibition, taking place over several weeks. This coming weekend the park will be host to a number of events such as KidFest, the weekly concerts, the Quality Foods Festival of Lights, along with the sand sculpting exhibition which will be lit up with lasers and other lights.
And while some of those events draw in tourists and those from outside the general community, it also brings residents of Parksville Qualicum Beach to one common place to come together.
In today’s paper, we have two stories about potential parks in the Parksville Qualicum Beach region and the importance of those community spaces.
In Qualicum Beach, the town council, community members and Elizabeth Little’s family celebrated the 80th anniversary of St. Andrew’s property on Wednesday (Aug. 1). The land, recently purchased by the Town of Qualicum Beach for $3.4 million, will become the largest Qualicum Beach “town-owned property on the waterfront.”
Coun. Bill Luchtmeijer described the future park as Qualicum Beach’s Stanley Park.
In French Creek, the Friends of French Creek Conservation Society recently released its results from a survey of the community on what to do with the estuary, specifically, whether or not it should become a park. According to the results, 74.5 per cent of 350 respondents “strongly agree” with creating a park. Only two per cent said they didn’t want a park.
It can be difficult for municipalities to balance the need to satisfy developers and bring money into the community while also conserving important sites and making them available to the public.
The NEWS is happy to see developers work together with the community in French Creek to create a new park, and Qualicum Beach and Little’s family come to an agreement to turn that historically important space into a new community gathering place.
— Parksville Qualicum Beach News