WEIGHING IN ON THE REVITALIZATION OF DOWNTOWN KELOWNA

To the editor:

I believe that your Close-up feature headlined Downtown: Reality vs.
Perception in the March 13 issue of the Capital News did not focus on the
real problems or solutions of Kelowna's downtown core.

I have just recently moved to Kelowna and I love this city for its
beautiful landscape and its friendly people. Many of those friendly
people are the homeless that were mentioned numerous times in your
article. My heart sinks when I see the young street prostitutes get
into those SUVs and pickup trucks along Lawrence and Leon with not a
police officer in sight.

Mr. (Clint) McKenzie (Downtown Kelowna Association) and Mr. (Gary)
Stephen (City of Kelowna), I believe your solutions to the problems
are both naive and simplistic. I would like to suggest the following
two solutions:

The City of Kelowna must take a hard stance on the "Johns," those
middle to upper class males who continually prey on the young women of
the streets by giving them a quick 70 bucks to feed their addictions
to crack cocaine.

Secondly, all Canadians must lobby aggressively to Paul Martin's
government to follow the lead of our neighbours to the south and
change our laws to put the hard drug dealers and marijuana grow
operators behind bars for a very long time.

The idea of highrise towers in the downtown core will only bring more
"Johns," more prostitutes and more dealers. How sad, so very, very
sad.

Dave Grindlay

Kelowna