posted on March 15, 2017 by Taber Times

As of March 20, 2017, the road to your home will be locked off.

Reason being, you have wrecked your road over the last 30 years of use. You have driven too fast, made potholes and tracks, and due to this, you are now locked out.

Or how about your local park, how would that be if it was locked up because somebody vandalized the equipment or has been riding on bike paths when muddy and wrecking the trail?

You might say this is crazy, I pay taxes, insurance and plates for my vehicle, this is just regular maintenance on the road and park. What is wrong here, this is insane.

Yes. It is insane, welcome to our world, the users of the Castle.

My family of children, grandchildren, have hunted, fished, hiked, ATV’d, rode horseback, random camped in forestry from the Oldman all the way to Waterton Park since 1982, and a lot of those trails are not much worse than they were then.

I laugh when I read all those comments from B.C. and wherever telling us how things are in the Castle. It’s my backyard friend, and I know better than you can even imagine of what’s going on.

We have been in business for 40 years, had a place in CNP for 13 years, paid taxes to government, CNP and all of a sudden me and my family are now weekend warriors, hell raisers, throw garbage, tear up the environment and don’t care about our area.

As I started this letter yes, we do need regular maintenance on our roads and also on our quad, hiking, horseback, mountain bike and whatever else trails we have.

We have had these trails for 30 plus years and that is what I am trying to get across, is the fact these trails need maintenance for all of us. Don’t let them pick us apart one user group at a time, or we are all doomed.

We have offered to pay the government user fees for random camping and ATVs for 20 years and also asked them to use part of the registration fees for trail maintenance, just to fall on deaf ears.

The government is on a mission in Alberta to turn all our areas into another Banff or Waterton, with paved roads so we can pay our park fee and the thousands of us can drive through daily and ooh and awe about how beautiful it is.

What they forgot is that these cars run on gasoline that pollutes our environment, but that’s OK. That’s better than the few quads or snowmobiles that are out there.

I just read a study that is there are good bridges, 90 plus per cent of ATVs use bridges.

The amount of supposed garbage been thrown around by quads and random campers is so blown out of perspective, it is unreal.

It’s always nice to hear from people who have never set foot in the forestry of how terrible it is when they are 400-600 kms away or not even from Canada.

Why the government has decided to hook up with Y2Y, a group of environmentalists with billions of dollars behind them from the States, I don’t know. They will walk over anybody or any group that get in their way.

Look at their track record; they have shut down third- and fourth-generation ranches, and whatever else they have to get their true environmental zone, where no one sets foot in.

The forestry is a place for all Alberta residents to enjoy the outdoors. To change to a park system only means another Banff or Jasper.

All I ask is for the people of Alberta to wake up before it’s too late and take a stand and say no. We, first of all, do not need all these parks and regulations.

I remember Ralph Klein said, “We don’t need any more parks in Alberta”, and he was 100 per cent right.

Please fight for all our areas across Alberta, whatever user group you are, before we lose it all.

Thank you,

LESTER JOCHEM