The Incredible 200 m Piece of Asphalt!

The following is a 'Letter to the Editor' which I submitted upon seeing a picture (with story) in the Nanaimo Daily News regarding the connection of east Lantzville Road to Dover Road, something my neighbours and I were promised by the Ministry of Transportation over 10 years ago!

Dear Editor,
The politicians in the photo accompanying your story in the Friday, Sept. 2nd edition of the Daily News regarding the 'opening' of the Lantzville Road extension to Dover Road (New road connects 'neighbours') certainly have reason to smile.
It's always a good day when politicians are able to take credit for helping solve a problem that they themselves created in the first place. Ever since the Bypass was opened in 1996, my neighbours and I have been putting up with up to 1100 cars a day (many of them ill-behaved) on what we were told would be a quiet, residential street, all because Mssrs. Haime, Scott and Dempsey and Mdme. Crayston, as Trustees of the Lantzville Improvement District, lobbied the Ministry of Transportation to change a long-standing committment to extend Lantzville Road to Dover after it was cut off from the Highway. Somehow, in the process, a developer ended up with a taxpayer-funded ($490,000) road across his vacant, downtown Lantzville property and we got all that traffic.
Nanaimo Mayor Korpan and Councillor McNabb can smile because the City will soon have yet another mall to pay high, commercial taxes, especially when all those empty spaces in the other malls are still paying plus the City was able to secure a $100,000 'donation' from Watt (not Wyatt) Ventures in exchange for Nanaimo playing along with the provincial government in taking in this recently 'orphaned' property.
If Cam Watt had been in the picture, he too would have reason to smile. Regular readers of this paper will recall that the property on which Dover Pointe Corner is being built (the Jeffs property) was taken from Lantzville by the provincial government after lobbying by the landowners and handed to Nanaimo.
Yep, that 200 m (not 500) section of road is "special" alright - its already provided one developer with almost half a million dollars of taxpayer's money for building a road which they would have had to provide for free on subdivision and it afforded Watt Ventures the ability to transfer their property from Lantzville into Nanaimo and have it zoned commercial, resulting in a 2.5-fold increase in its assessed value. Not bad just for knowing the right people!
In my simplistic world, 'neighbours' don't break promises and they certainly don't seek to take land from each other, disrupting lives along the way. So far, all of the giving in this relationship has been distinctly one-sided. Even after Nanaimo had taken several pieces of property from Lantzville, implied that our Area Director was lying and insulted our Mayor, Lantzville Council still made decisions based on wanting to 'appease' Nanaimo.

Update: Besides the Lantzville politicians in the picture, who sought to take credit for solving a problem which they helped create in the first place, we now have councillor Warren Griffey, councillor Douglas Parkhurst and councillor candidate, Denise Haime (the Mayor's wife), also seek to take credit for completing this small stretch of road. Ms. Haime has claimed that she negotiated this 'compensation' when the then-Minister of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Services (formerly Municipal Affiars), George Abbot, told her in no uncertain terms that the Jeffs' property was going to Nanaimo and asked her what she, as Area 'D' Regional Director, needed to 'smooth things over'. Having been actively involved with this issue for the past eight years, I fail to see what contribution either councillor Griffey or councillor Parkhurst have made in that respect. I do, however, recall seeing an earlier picture in the same paper in which councillor Parkhurst participated in the sod-turning ceremony for the shopping centre to be built on this former Lantzville 'buffer' property.