A long time Kelowna resident who has been advocating for public access to the foreshore says despite regulations and pleas from the public, non-compliant docks are still being built.
Brenda Bachmann was hoping that docks destroyed by record Okanagan Lake water levels in the spring would be rebuilt in a way that doesn’t impede access, but she says some are still too high or too long.
“Anytime that you have one foot near the water or at the water, you’re supposed to be able to go over top of a dock with a set of stairs and down the other side,” she told AM110’s Early Edition “And none of them that I found yesterday had it.”
She even believes one property owner has taken a unique step to ensure the public stays away from the foreshore in front of their property.
“They have a motion sensor on their dock to spray people with water any time they get close to the dock.”
Whether or not it’s been installed to prevent people from approaching is unconfirmed, as motion sprinklers have also been known to be keep birds and deer off property.
But Bob Warner, Resource Manager for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations, which regulates foreshore land use, says he’s never heard of sprinklers being installed on a dock before.
He says they are addressing complaints of property owners not following regulations, but with a backlog of 194 individual reports of non-compliance along Okanagan Lake, he expects it to take 1-2 years.
“Those are files that we need to work on and it’s a lot of structures, a lot of walls/fences that need to be addressed,” he said.
Warner believes the rebuild has been going well and says additional staff and resources have been added to oversee the rebuild, which includes educating property owners.
“I think we got 27 boat days out there making sure that the docks being built, the contractors have the appropriate paperwork, are aware of what needs to get done and how to do it.”
A walk Bachmann organized along the foreshore in August to bring attention to how difficult it is to walk along the lake unimpeded attracted over 200 people. She also hired a drone cameraman to shoot the 5 kilometre stretch of the foreshore from William Bennett Bridge to Mission Creek, before the flooding even occured, to illustrate how inaccessible some of it is.