Colour me biased

We went to Richmond Hill and drove up and down the town centre on Yonge Street a couple of times.

I was looking for  improvements.

Councillor Thompson indicated Richmond  Hill had  enacted  a Community  Improvement Plan.

That's where   a municipality  spends massive amounts on infrastructure improvements and offers to provide grants and loans to property owners to spruce up their properties at the expense of other property owners ,who may or may not be able to maintain their own property properly because of lack of resources.

Heavens to Betsy...whoever heard of such a thing in Aurora. Certainly not among the well-heeled crowd at the Council table.

Community Improvement  is a planners scheme for revitalizing town centers against all the odds.

It's what you get when you believe there is no  inevitability that can't be reversed if you just throw enough money at it.

 Exchange  excessive cash for excessive verbiage and you get the picture.

Change  the audience from experience  to eager neophytes , add an army of redundant civil servants heavily interspersed with  graduates from programs  taught  at universities by  those who cannot do and you have Australian sized  flocks of sheep  ready for shearing.

I noticed  little improvement in Richmond Hill.  Yonge Street is a higgledy-piggledy  mess with an assortment of store fronts  on  modest , downright plain, frame structures.

Signage  has no uniformity and  less style.

There is certainly plenty of retail  presence; not much in the way of pedestrians. Nothing to indicate business is flourishing.

Interlocking brick sidewalks ,the precursor of patterned concrete, are severely undulating and in need of replacement.

 Spindly scabby,unhealthy replicas of trees are perched precariously  at the edge of sidewalks.  Deformed stems lean out to avoid  structures in too close proximity.

I saw nothing in Richmond Hill  yesterday to encourage me to  accept  a Community Improvement Plan   as something we should follow.

It probably looks much better in Spring.

 Everything does.

But the fact is,winter in Canada is at least a third of our reality.

Beautiful pristine snow on trees and fields is a breathtaking sight to behold.

In a down town traffic oriented area ,it's just a mucky mess to be avoided if at all possible.

One of my first experiences in Canada was to be drenched to the shoulders  of my new camel- coat by a car driving through a puddle on a street north of Bloor.

It wasn't nice.

D'you know......I would rather find  a way to protect store fronts and pedestrians  from splashed up muck and slush  on Yonge Street in the down town core of Aurora than all the airy-fairy heritage schemes in Christendom.

I am beginning to hate the word  ...heritage.

Maybe we should label it  unacceptable ,,,,as  in biased against  being.

It has occurred to me ...downtown Aurora  is one helluva lot more tidy and attractive than anything Richmond Hill has to offer.

We haven't just kept talking about preserving what is best.

The private sector has just been quietly going about it for the last fifty years with a little encouragement from their friends and representatives  at the town.