On Wednesday night a group of about twenty people representing local ski and outdoor clubs, NCC officials, trail maintenance contractors, ski patrollers and representatives of the park-using public met to discuss winter trail issues in Gatineau Park.
The roundtable was termed Park Dialogue: Winter Trails and had been initiated in part because for the last few seasons the NCC has been receiving a high level of complaints from winter users of Gatineau Park.
This was the second meeting for the purpose and like the first it proceeded in a very “process oriented” manner with flip charts, mandate & composition review and discussion of what measures of success we’d like to see, before getting to the heart of the matter.
Of course the heart of the matter are the issues themselves and we did eventually get to them.
What’s more we’ve set another date two three weeks* from now to actually go at them hammer and tongs. Two weeks is lightning speed for this kind of process and underlines the eagerness of the participants to make some progress. Although the setup time for the discussions may seem long, my sense among the group was that it wasn’t time wasted; that we are approaching which issues are priorities, and how to address them, in an appropriate manner.
As part of that exercise it was suggested that the broader park-using public get a chance to give their 2¢ worth on which are priority issues. To that end I will be posting a poll listing issues that you can help rank. That will appear in a couple of days. I’ll be able to share the code snippet so that the poll can appear on other people’s websites as well (with all results going to the same database).
We concurred that there wasn’t a need for a confidentiality agreement but that we also didn’t want “he said / she said” stories coming out, counterproductive to honest discussion. For this reason I feel that I can report things in good faith but I’ll not be out to embarrass any of the participants. If I make a misstep I hope someone will call me on it.
* Memory fail – Actually people were willing to reconvene in two weeks but more were available three weeks out (that’s Wed Feb 2nd).
The cards that GuideGatineau has begun distributing to promote the website are considered to be highly environmentally responsible due to the fact that the paper used is 100% recycled and is produced using energy from biofuels plus the ink is vegetable based.