By Geoff Smith - Lethbridge News Now

Objections continue to choice of location for Waterton visitor centre

Nov 19, 2017 | 9:59 AM

WATERTON, AB — Lesley Little says it’s a wrong decision not just for the residents of the Waterton Lakes National Park townsite, but for visitors as well.

Little, the president of the Waterton Lakes Leaseholders Association, is disappointed Parks Canada has not changed its mind about the location of a new visitor centre for the park. Federal environment minister Catherine McKenna released a statement Wednesday, Nov. 16, stating she had considered the views of stakeholders and the process, and was reaffirming the decision to build on Block 39, within the townsite.

The location, first announced in March 2016, prompted objections about traffic and parking problems that have already been growing in the town.

“The larger question is, that townsite is already overwhelmed on several weekends during a summer,” Little said in an interview Thursday. “It’s a two-lane road in and out of a townsite, that’s on an alluvial plain. It’s ridiculous that they would not consider a larger aspect of the park.”

Little said Parks Canada has rejected possible sites near the entrance gate and the compound, because it wants to restore natural fescue grasses. She replies that’s land that was disturbed decades ago.

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“Especially after the fire, when 30 per cent of the park is burned, one of the last green spaces they’re willing to dig up now to put a building on it,” she said. “I don’t understand that, except that they had said from the outset that that’s what they wanted to do.”

Little was in a meeting in late August that included McKenna’s parliamentary secretary, Jonathan Wilkinson. She said three quarters of the way through that meeting, she felt the decision had already been made. She alluded to a court challenge that’s been launched, but is not part of it and declined further comment.

She wants people to understand it’s not just from their own standpoint that they object to the location, but for the visitor experience as well.

“The previous location doesn’t work, but having it in the townsite also doesn’t work because you have a two-lane road going down a hill into a very congested area. It’s hard to get a big bus down those streets anyway. They don’t seem to think so, but experience has dictated otherwise.

“Experience doesn’t seem to be in their interests, so what else do you do?”