Dalhousie council gives away soccer and baseball fields to private company
Dalhousie will turn over the town's soccer and baseball fields to a private company that wants to develop housing for seniors.
The land on Chaleur Street will be given to Dalhousie Nursing Home Inc. for $1, despite opposition from residents who gathered at the special public meeting where town council approved the deal.
The company plans to build 20 apartments for independent seniors.
The town announced earlier this year that it was willing to give away land to encourage commercial, residential and industrial development, something Mayor Normand Pelletier reminded residents about when council agreed to the Dalhousie Nursing Home deal.
Concerned citizens
Residents, who could not speak before the purchase and sale agreement was approved, said they were unhappy with the entire council and complained of a lack of transparency surrounding the giveaway of the land used for sports.
Some said they only learned of the deal from social media. Parents said they had difficulty coming to terms with the decision to transfer the fields to a privately owned company.
The mayor promised short-term solutions would be sought to move the sports activities to other locations, although the city does not own other soccer fields. The other fields belong to the school system.
Pelletier said at the meeting that one local citizen out of three is retired and if they leave, it would damage the municipality.
Life-long resident John Young told CBC on Thursday he was disappointed with the council's decision.
"I believe to redevelop the town, we need to have our youth know that there is something here for people to settle," Young said.
"And the way we're headed, we're making ourselves a retirement community, and I can't see anybody coming here maybe to set up a business, per say, that would have a wife, young children, if we're going to have a community that doesn't have any recreation facilities."
'It's devastating'
Young said he's seen a rapid decline in the town since the downsizing of the local paper mill began in 1991 and transfer of ownership in 1998, eventually leading to the mill's closure in 2008.
Since then, he said, things haven't been the same. For example, last year, Dalhousie turned another ball fields into a dog park.
He also said the town had to get rid of the minor hockey association, and combine the baseball league with nearby communities just to keep it going.
Young, who worked at the mill until 1998, has worked on the road for a power line company the last five years. Like many others, he works 28 days on the job and comes home for 10 every month.
"Like everybody else, everybody left," he said.
"It's not fair to completely blame the town, but politically, we haven't had any help at all."
Young said he wants the town to come up with better ways to build that don't include axing things that make the place interesting for young people.. He said sometimes people tell him he's living in the past, but he doesn't believe it.
"I feel that the older retired people on a pension, they don't really care about the future," he said. "They're just more or less happy to have what they have, they like the way they live, they thought of better years.
"But it doesn't mean that the town should die there."
