Given that past there are plenty of reasons to suggest predictions about the town’s population doubling or trebling over the next twenty to thirty years will end up fairly wide of the mark, but a look at the building and other economic activity going on around town suggests, for once, the predictions might turn out to be right.
At the same time I’m not seeing many signs of serious long-term strategic planning around the place.
By coincidence, when I started thinking what the town’s going to be like in twenty-five years’ time I’d been in town for close to a quarter-century, so Bowen, 25 Years On seemed like a reasonable title.
At the time I had vague thoughts of trying to get discussion of the relevant issues going, but the controversy that erupted over the Skate Bowl in the Front Beach Redevelopment suggested any discussion was likely to be heavily manipulated if it went through either of our existing media outlets, which seem to occupy opposite sides of a reasonably high fence.
I didn’t think there’d be any point in going to any of the major media outlets outside town because I suspect that the discussion would be the topic du jour for a day or two and then be fairly quickly assigned to the backburner as other issues in other areas presented themselves.
The contents of the Bowen, 25 Years On pages haven’t been updated since they were created, and an update is probably well and truly overdue, but I thought I’d wait to see until there was some sort of local controversy that raises some of the issues I’ve been looking at before I set about doing a major rewrite of what’s there.
After all, it’s not as if I’m short of things to write about...