“Volunteers built 100 Mile House.”
If you talk to any longtime resident of the South Cariboo, they’ll gladly tell you that. So many of the 100 Mile House facilities we now take for granted were built with volunteer labour and supplies.
The 100 Mile Community Hall. The Stan Halcro Agriplex. The 100 Mile Nordic Ski Trails. The baseball fields. The list goes on and on. Even the South Cariboo Rec Centre benefitted from volunteers donating time, money and supplies to help make the centre the cornerstone of our community that it is today.
But times have changed.
It used to be you could get a bunch of people with a common dream together to build something and not have to worry much about government permits or liability issues lurking in the shadows. Nowadays regulations, laws and high-cost rules to keep us all safe from all things would likely have at least hampered, if not ended altogether, projects like the community hall.
Last week an example of that old school South Cariboo can-do spirit ran afoul of regulations. The Slopeline Bike Park, an unofficial dirtbike/mountain bike park built by local youth, was bulldozed by the District of 100 Mile House. In a release, the district said this was done to protect public safety and prevent potential liability issues. The district explained they brought an expert in to assess the unsanctioned trails and that expert felt it would cost too much to bring the project up to an “insurable standard.” Ah, the insurable standard. The same one that has buried the housing market under an avalanche of building codes and last winter led a couple of Ontario towns to consider banning tobogganing.
So many solutions in search of problems.
While the district’s concern for public safety and the public purse is understandable, the decision left a bad taste in many community members’ mouths. Watching something built by teenagers and young adults with their own hands and their own ingenuity be torn down seems wrong.
The jumps and trails of the Slopeline may not have been safe, in a legal sense, but in the over six years they existed no serious injuries were reported. The community of bikers who made the jumps used them at their own risk and looked out for one another.
One has to wonder what kind of message we are sending to young people with the erasure of Slopeline. The teens and youth of this town were told this week that they can put hours of effort into building something for their community only to see it torn down in a day. They may be safe from a bike jump that is too high or a trail descent that is too steep - at least the ones in Slopeline, if not the myriad others further from sight - but are they safe from the can’t-do, don’t-bother apathy that increasingly paralyzes our society at every level?
100 Mile House was built on the blood, sweat and tears of volunteers, it’s true, but whether or not it will be maintained and brought to new heights by future volunteers may be in doubt.