Hundreds people are expected to attend a rally against blanket rezoning bylaws at Calgary’s South Glenmore Park on Saturday afternoon. The event was organized by a group of nine local women from Ward 11 who are frustrated with Calgary city council for not listening to the public’s pushback on blanket rezoning legislation. As the Western Standard reported in May, councillors approved citywide blanket rezoning even after a historic 15-day public hearing, which included 6,100 written submissions and 736 speakers. Of the speakers, 458 (62.2%) were opposed and 227 (30.8) were in favour. The new rezoning rules now allow multi-tenant building developments to be built in residential neighbourhoods with single-family homes — plus all the infrastructure that goes with it, such as residential roads. “We hope the city will see this and listen to what we want and don’t want — all our communities being taken over with unnecessary building,” Calista Wintrip, one of the rally’s organizers, told the Western Standard. “I hope it comes to the point (of legislation change at city council) where they re-vote on it, or they (at least) re-vote on developments in our particular communities.”Wintrip and her group’s message to Mayor Jyoti Gondek and the city council is, “take our message to heart” and “really see how upset this rezoning has made us.”“We are frustrated with the council for not listening to our voices when we said loud and clear that we do not want this in our neighbourhoods.”Community members involved want to protect their neighborhoods for future generations. “We don’t want to see our homes right now affected for the future generations, we want to keep the greenspace we have, because we’re getting less and less of them,” she said. Wintrip said in her neighbourhood, Riverbend, a housing development is in the works behind her home, which impacts her family and many others. “They want to build condominiums and high-rises and have about 1,000 people living behind a greenspace in our neighbourhood.”“The second part to that is they want to open a residential street to all traffic, which would be a major problem because this particular road is not wide enough to have buses and emergency (vehicles) and a steady stream of traffic come through.” The road would have to be widened on taxpayers’ dime.
