Continued concerns around the operation of snowmobiles inside town limits has finally reached a point where a stand needs to be taken.
During last Tuesday’s council meeting, councillor Tanu Tyszka-Evans brought council’s attention to the issue of dangerous snowmobile driving in town limits.
“Lately, they’ve gotten quite brash,” said Tyszka-Evands.
“It’s late at night (and) they’re racing up and down residential streets now. Before it was just, they used to drive by slowly when they would get to the trail, go hard, whatever, and my elderly neighbor was almost hit taking out her garbage.”
There was also an incident in the community peace officer’s report where there were snowmobilers driving in the skate park.
“It is something that is of very big concern to me, as now, I do notice he has something in here that they were driving all over the skate park. So, now they’re potentially vandalizing town property as well. And, I think this council and this town took a stand against this,” he added.
Both the town and the River Runners – the local snowmobile club – believes that the best way to decrease the amount of people driving snowmobiles through town is by telling people of the bylaws.
“Ninety-five per cent of the snowmobiles or off-road vehicle users want to obey the relevant legislation, want to travel safely and want to make sure that there aren’t vehicle/pedestrian conflicts. So, we expect that as the education grows, that we’ll see a real decrease,” said Josh Pyrcz, chief administrative officer for the town.
Although this issue is something that’s well known in both the community and council, it’s very difficult to find any written legislation or signs posted saying what the rules actually are.
“They don’t know they can’t do it. There’s no signs up. There’s nowhere that says you can’t. There’s towns in Alberta that allow sleds in town, so that’s one part of it,” said Jean Bilsky, a spokesperson for the River Runners.
“If you move to Athabasca and you saw sled tracks in your neighborhood, you would think no different. You would think ‘Okay, we can sled in town.’”
Bilsky stated the club does post up signs stating to “Stick to the Route,” but the town needs to do their part.
“We do want to continue to have our routes, but we don’t encourage sledding in town. But, the town needs to put a sign up somewhere,” she said.
Pyrcz agrees.
“We do have, in certain areas, the trail systems posted. But, we need to do a better job of getting those out into the paper on a regular basis and reminding people that this is where this activity is acceptable,” he stated.
He also explained administration is starting to create a process to bring the faces or snowmobiles out to the public so the culprits can be identified.
“I think the biggest concern we have, both as a council and an administration is we have almost no way of pursuing or finding out who these individuals are without the community’s assistance,” he said.
“We’ve been hearing about this concern coming for some time and so we have some plans in place to deal with it.”
