The City of Kelowna put together this backgrounder for the Burtch Road extension project:
Before it became a pond, it was a gravel pit. What was a private property is now a city park. Land acquisition by the City of Kelowna always serves a purpose for the community. In this case, the creation of Munson Pond Park serves two purposes.
The City of Kelowna sometimes acquires property from private owners when there is a strategic, often long-term, reason to invest in a particular property.
Munson Pond Park was created by the City of Kelowna a decade ago, after it acquired the property from private owners. The City saw value of preserving the undeveloped property as a park, with a portion of the land also envisioned to provide a north-south road to serve the growing population in the south of the City.
In 2014, the City of Kelowna worked with the Central Okanagan Land Trust (COLT) to establish a Conservation Covenant on most of the 9.82 ha Munson Pond Park. The goal was to re-naturalize the area.
“As the plan began to take shape, COLT made several successful applications for funding to support its efforts. At the same time, we were grateful to receive the help of a number of individuals, community groups and businesses to do the actual work of weeding, planting, and general site clean-up to get the park ready,” according to the COLT website.
With that naturalization work complete, the City is now moving ahead with the road extension to connect two currently dead-end road portions. The road allotment skirts along the western edge of the property – 100 metres away from the pond.
When the gravel pit was abandoned in the early 1960s, the area’s high water table quickly filled the pit. Since then, the site has become a favourite site for bird watching and a peaceful walk in nature, while surrounded by our urban landscape.
It’s an oasis of nature amid the condos, school, commercial buildings and traffic on Benvoulin and KLO roads – an oasis the City is committed to preserving.
The property’s second strategic benefit is the ability to create a new north-south corridor that provides an option for commuters in the southern neighbourhood of the City by connecting the two existing sections of Burtch Rd. The new route improves travel times but also will create more redundancy and reliability for the city’s Transportation network as Development continues.
This phase of Burtch Road is being advanced as part of the Transportation Accelerator Program (TAP) that identified several transportation projects for design and delivery sooner than identified due to rapid population growth.
Details and design panels for accelerated road programs, including Burtch Road, are available here.
Residents can learn, ask questions and provide their priorities on preliminary designs for Burtch Road and Hollywood Road extensions via online survey before May 13.
