Good idea, but wrong location for community garden proposal

August 12, 2015 · 0 Comments

(Re: Community garden “template” proposed for Aurora, August 6)

In the article appearing in The Auroran, the Aurora Community Tennis Club (ACTC) was referred to as the main user of the park.
In fact we are one of several groups who use the Park. There is also the Aurora Community Lawn Bowling Association and a children’s soccer league using the park.
There are many dog walkers, kite flyers and people picnicking at the gazebo that overlooks the tennis courts.
Disappointingly, we were not consulted about this proposal.
The ACTC has approximately 260 members and the lawn bowling group has 40 members and our collective activities often lead to overflowing parking issues. While in principle, the ACTC supports community gardens for residents, we feel that there are significant parking issues that infringe on the legacy users of the park.
McMahon Park is in a traffic be-calmed area and adding more projects would result in even more traffic into the neighbourhood.
We encourage the initiators of this project to look at other locations. It may be a more appropriate strategy to expand existing community gardens.

Brent MacKinnon
President, Aurora Community Tennis Club