Silver Lake is such a rare asset, will the county be able to preserve such a beautiful site, I am not too hopeful. Prince William Conservation Alliance has an excellent post up on their blog. If you care about conservation, parks, government process, and integrity, you should click on this link. Make your voices heard, it does make a difference.
A public hearing is scheduled for 7:30 pm tonight strong at the Prince William County Park Authority’s headquarters, at Hellwig Park. It is the first, and perhaps the only, opportunity to comment to the Park Authority Board on the three alternatives developed by county staff for developing recreational facilities at Silver Lake.
Proposed new trails, parking lots, and campgrounds might damage environmentally-sensitive areas – but the maps show only the facilities to be constructed. The three alternatives never identify the environmental assets to be protected. The staff has proposed a standard county park development plan without the ballfields, adding in a fishing pier but ignoring the special character of the Silver Lake site.
Failure to inventory the natural areas at Silver Lake before locating new facilities on a map is an amazing omission. It demonstrates that the Park Authority is locked into its active recreation mindset, and has no clue about managing natural resources.
The staff measures success by how many new things they can build, how much they can change a site. That failure to consider the resources at a site is why the historical places owned by the county were transferred away from the Park Authority, and moved to Public Works.
Talk to Elena about that. My overview of the story of Silver Lake was very brief and did not go into detail…mainly because I don’t know the details.
My stories about Silver Lake are much different. They involve woods nymphs and campfires.
PWC Taxpayer said “I went to the site and its not helpful other than to sugggest that somebody tried to require very restrictive passive use – so my sense here is that that is why the deal fell through – and that would be a shame.”
I went to the website and learned that Supervisors said only passive recreation uses were allowed when they voted to give Silver Lake to the Park Authority. Supervisors have to vote to change that before the Park Authority could do anything other that passive recreation at Silver Lake.
I think that’s important because it says Supervisors are really still the ones in charge of Silver Lake. Maybe they would like people to forget that so they could blame the Park Authority if there are problems.
BTW, there’s a link on the webpage to a letter saying why BRMC dropped out of the Silver Lake contest. They say it was because the BOCS was hopelessly deadlocked. 4 for BRMC and 4 for the Park Authority.
The Park Authority won and promised only passive uses at Silver Lake. Now we will see if they are as good as their words.
They certainly didn’t want to lock into the deed that kept passive recreation in prepetuity…whatever the name is for that…..
I figured they wanted to put a water slide out there once everyone forgot about the passive recreation feature. A mini golf site, a few bumper cars, a petting zoo might bring in some cash.