The Our Town - Clarenville Blog by Paul Tilley

This week's edition of the Packet carries a story on the continuing saga of the parking lot at the Clarenville Shopping Centre.  Normally parking lots are not newsworthy but this lot is special - you own it!  (see story: A 'lot' at stake , The Packet) In the context of 1966 when the lot was built, it made perfect sense for a community interested in growth, to develop a piece of land (that would become the Clarenville Shopping Centre's parking lot) so to encourage private developers to build a “modern’ shopping facility.   The idea worked, but the fact that someone neglected to write in a sunset clause into the development agreement that specified that ownership of the parking lot would transfer to the developers after a defined point in time is still haunting us almost half a century later. So what’s the matter with the Town owning the lot you may ask?   For starters the fact that “our lot” is 50 years old means that it needs a tremendous amount of very...