It is nice to see City council more worried about absentee landlord’s pocketbooks than the long-term residents of West Park East.

Just because these illegal suites have existed for a number of years does not mean they have not caused problems. Since 2004, we have petitioned the City to do something about the proliferation of illegal suites in our area and we presented a map of our area to the City identifying 54 secondary suites out of 200 residences.

The reason for this proliferation of illegal suites was due to the City putting a moratorium on enforcement in 2003 resulting in no illegal suites being shut down. In other words, the City made the mess.

The City lawyer at the start of our ad hoc meetings told us when the 15% cap was reached in an area that would be the end of the number of suites allowed.

In the last six months the definition of illegal nonconforming suites has been changed three times so we have gone from seven in all of West Park to 28 in West Park East with more to come. And these have been grandfathered in, so how many are we actually going to end up with?

So instead of dealing with the issue in West Park East, council wants to sweep it under the table by raising the amount of suites allowed in our area and making all illegal suites legal. It is nice to see, that the council is teaching our children that you can break the law and then be rewarded.

It is disappointing to see how easily council can break their initial commitment to our community and ignore the Secondary Suite Ad Hoc Committee recommendations.

What was the point of having this committee?

Dale Reid

Red Deer