The following is an edited version of a letter forwarded to us that was addressed to the city of Lindsay, Ontario. This is typical of how powersports is negatively viewed by city officials…
Attention Mayor and Councillors:
I am writing to appeal to the council’s need for common sense. It is time to get our city moving forward again.
On the provincial snowmobile trail map there is a circle around the Town of Lindsay with an “X” thru it and a no snowmobiles sign. As a person who has grown up in this community it hurts personally, in fact I just spent a weekend hauling a large part of our store to PETERBOROUGH for the Kawartha Cup snowmobile races that used to be held in LINDSAY. What a surprise to see so many of our Lindsay customers spending their money in Peterborough. In fact every restaurant was full including a table of forty racers at Kelsey’s.
What does this have to do with allowing an ATV to travel on a certain road to rejoin and continue across the Trans Canada Trail? Plenty. If we keep closing off our communities to everything from the outside our city will shrivel up and die. We need new business and tourism and a forward thinking approach to deal with these issues.
Everyone is in complete agreement we cannot have ATV’s, snowmobiles, dirt bikes or anything else roaring around the streets of our city and atv owners will be the first to police themselves as the snowmobilers do.
Our business alone supports directly twenty families as full time staff plus tons of spin off for local suppliers. We pay big property taxes, support a ton of local charities and are expanding and reinvesting in our property using local builders of course. What would the rail line look like if ATV and snowmobile riders did not maintain it? I will bet a bicycle would not even be able to traverse it.
The negative “keep out” mentality has slowed progress in our city. From new businesses to hockey tournaments to people passing through on the Trent Canal, we have to do a better job of saying “Welcome to our City!”
The rest of the Canada is working to build a trail across the country but right now the City of Kawartha Lakes is the weakest link. Please start the ball rolling in the right direction.
Thank you!
Phil Hodgson
President
HB CYCLE
