Dear Editor,

Council may find my request interesting as well as unusual. I ask that they do nothing for me or my home community of Fort Langley.

Just continue supplying water, collecting garbage, fixing potholes, and doing other tasks they do so well.

I will continue paying my taxes, which are reasonable. Nothing more is needed. Nothing.

Soon council will be asked to change our zoning laws to permit a three-storey structure to be built here. We need it about as much as we need a cholera outbreak, but people in council will be told it would be good for the good of the community.

That's the reason offered by governments of any level of authority: in the long term, it is for our own good.

Thus, council will be asked to end our ban on big buildings: for the good of Fort Langley, the usual reason a government of any tye offers for doing any damn thing it pleases.

Take a moment to consider our happy pursuit of being small and unimportant:

. We don't have magnificent houses on rolling acres.

. We don't have a huge sports complex, a superstore, or a cathedral.

. We don't want them, now or ever. Some small places on this earth were never meant to be anything but small.

Here, people speak to strangers on the street, or at least nod.

There is no rush our, evening or morning.

At May Day, there are almost as many people in the parade as watching it.

No community can claim completely safe traffic, but our collisions are at low speeds.

The old, the halt, and the lame can get across our streets at their own pace.

All the streets, building lots, and the buildings thereon are laid out on principles of the Flat Earth theory. If others laugh, we don't mind, it works for us.

Can you, in your wildest imagination, even begin to see a way in which smashing our current building code can improve any of the qualities I have listed?

Paul St. Pierre, Fort Langley