UPDATE: Alberta Off Highway Vehicle Association worried Porcupine, Livingstone trails will be significantly reduced
LETHBRIDGE – UPDATE: LNN has spoken with Environment Minister Shannon Phillips regarding the potential for OHV trail/random camping closures in the Castle/Livingstone areas, along with further closures in the Castle Parks. Here are her statements:
“Both of those areas have gone through extensive consultation with local land owners and local grazing-lease holders. People who actually live and make a living in those areas; with municipalities, with recreational groups as well, in addition to the motorized community. So now what we need to do is to a bit more careful analysis on our budgets, and the kinds of investments that we are going to be making to support people’s recreational activity in both Porcupine/Livingstone and Castle. You know, Albertans are looking for places to camp, fish, hunt, hike and all of that needs investment. The previous government didn’t invest in our recreation areas at all. The toilets, the water systems, the roads were left to fall apart. And so as we plan how we’re going to manage these competing demands for recreation and for people to make a living, and to quietly enjoy their property in some of these areas, we still have a little bit of work to do, in terms of how much we’re going to be investing, and where. Some of the things the motorized community have been asking for are quite expensive, and so we do have money set aside, millions of dollars in fact, for Porcupine/Livingstone and other trail areas up on the eastern slopes and in the Castle areas as well. We need to take the time to get those right.”
On the proposed AOHVA four-point plan:
“The amount of money that is actually raised through a registration system does not cover the costs of this kind of infrastructure investment and maintenance and renewal. So it’s easy to under estimate how much these investments actually cost the taxpayer. And I know that they have brought such a system in, in B.C., and I believe it brought in $600,000 at first implementation, and it will… I think it’s going to go up now. So we’ll watch carefully how the B.C. system works. I have asked the snowmobile association as well to have a look at this. And potentially we might be able to pilot it with winter recreation. But I think there remains a lot of work to be done around the summer recreation. And I think it would be premature to say that the registration system is under active consideration by government at this time.”