To the Editor,
Re: Grass could be greener in cemetery: Kenny, Aug. 15.
As we try to market our burg to the world including inviting Chinese youth here to complete their high-school education—like others, I must question peoples’ priorities.
For example, during the Alberni Valley’s notoriously crispy-hot summer months when, as Port Alberni’s city parks director Scott Kenny confirms “the grass burns out” at Greenwood cemetery, why consider spending several thousand dollars installing an irrigation system to keep the grass green?
It’s not worth it, considering it’s only needed for maybe two or three months of the whole year. The grass will renew itself in very short time with the autumn/winter/spring rains.
Surely the dearly departed would agree there’s better use for the city’s limited financial resources that would be negligible on the list of “bad precedents”.
Perhaps they’d rather a comparitively measly $250 be instead donated to a young Port Alberni citizen like Benson Wishart who could make a fine representative of Port Alberni to the Canada World Youth International Education Program in which he plans to participate.
As long as the grass is kept cut, neat ‘n’ tidy, brown grass is not dishonouring those who rest in the cemetery.
It’s more dishonourable to sqander money on an unnecessary irrigation system when a smidgen could be applied to advancing the community’s youth with some kind of municipal scholarship program set up just for the kinds of requests brought forward by Mr. Wishart.
Liz Stonard,
Port Alberni