Thursday - Oct. 24, 2024 - A culinary hole at Mission's biggest park

🌦 High 10C

Good morning!

Have you lost something that you never had? That’s the nightmare recently faced by Adrian Chiles, one of the most-entertaining columnists writing today. (Start your day off with a smile by reading the column here.)

The column reminded me of my own self-created moments of anxiety, wherein everything is going well until I deliberately question whether I have left the door unlocked, or left the water running, or failed to do any number of tasks that are so automatic I don’t notice myself doing them. Anxiety inevitably grips me until I either go to double-check I haven’t screwed up—particularly annoying when one is already down the road in the car—or I convince myself that I’m not a total idiot. The problem is that just so often, I am absent-minded just enough to make a bone-headed mistake or, like, forget to send my newsletter to 30,000 email inboxes.

– Tyler

Keep local journalism alive by supporting The Current. Become a Current Insider member today and help bring local stories to life.

Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope (We have had to temporarily change our forecast links to the Weather Network due to a technical error.)

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

Halloween spooks and pumpkin patches

Prod at the paranormal. Traverse tales of the undead. Hang on the edge of horror. Or simply celebrate at a costume party.

This Halloween season, the Fraser Valley is filled with events for ghouls and guys of all spook-levels—whether you’re hoping to scream at a corn maze, laugh at a horror film, or dress up for a dance. The Halloween spirit is extended to both kids and adults, with 19-plus parties, teen carnivals, and kid-friendly treats.

• Today, Grace unpacks some of the valley’s best Halloween events.

• Each event comes with a scare rating: 🎃 fun for everyone, 🎃🎃 light frights, 🎃🎃🎃 chills and thrills.

• At the bottom of the story you can find a list of Fraser Valley pumpkin patches. If we missed one, let us know.

Related

Need to Know

🐔 Avian flu has been detected at three farms in Abbotsford and Chilliwack [Country Life in BC]

🙀 Cat advocates are calling on Langley Township to reduce the number of feral cats in the community by requiring spaying and neutering [Langley Advance Times]

⚖ A spree of robberies in Abbotsford, Langley, and Surrey has resulted in a two-year prison term [Abbotsford News]

🚨 A missing Chilliwack woman has been found dead [Chilliwack Progress]

🚑 A three-vehicle crash on Townline Road in Abbotsford left one person with life-threatening injuries [Abbotsford Police/Facebook]

🧻 A suspicious fire in the toilet paper aisle of Mission’s Superstore closed the store [Mission Record]

🐟 A new culvert is expected to rejuvenate a Seabird Island-area salmon spawning channel [Agassiz-Harrison Observer]

❌ Chilliwack council says more consultation is needed for a proposed pot shop near a park recognizing veterans; the site used to house a liquor store [Chilliwack Progress]

📈 Enrolment in Langley’s schools ‘only’ grew by 860 students last year [Aldergrove Star]

👉 Mission’s hospice society wants to build a new 30-bed building on Ferndale Avenue [Mission Record]

🏗 A large new boomerang-shaped commercial building has been approved in Langley [Langley Advance Times]

SPONSORED BY CITY OF ABBOTSFORD

Your Council in the Community

Check out some of the important work being done by Abbotsford City Council on the Your Council in the Community web section, which includes Council Briefs, Blogs as well as photos of Council out and about in our city!

The Agenda

Retirements prompt Mission to search for new operators of park-based restaurant

The end has come for a key fixture of Mission’s dining scene—and largest park.

The operators of Mission’s Blackberry Kitchen restaurant, Laurel and Kerry Martin, announced this week that they are retiring at the end of the month. Their departure will not only leave a hole in the local culinary community, it will also force the City of Mission to find a new tenant for the log building that housed the restaurant.

In an Instagram post Wednesday, the city thanked the Martins, while saying it will try to find someone else to operate a fine dining restaurant at Fraser River Heritage Park. The city suggested it will issue a call for proposals over the coming months. The restaurant’s last day will be Nov. 24.

About that transit yard

Why does it take so long to build a bus storage and maintenance yard? That’s the question asked by several readers after Grace Giesbrecht’s story on the additional buses for the Fraser Valley Express yesterday. As she reported, BC Transit has bought a site for a new transit depot on Progress Way in Chilliwack. FVRD staff note that the new facility won’t be fully operational until the 2027/28 fiscal year.

The seven-acre site already includes a 20,000-square-foot building with maintenance bays and office space. But the site also needs electric bus charging equipment, a bus wash, a service island, and other improvements. We wrote that BC Transit “hoped” it would be open by 2028. Although true, the suggested schedule could see the site open the previous year. Still, some readers wonder why the new facility can’t be fully operational sooner. The answer is red tape and money—and practical realities.

First, BC Transit has a lease until 2027/2028 at its current facility, so it doesn’t need the full use of the site right away. The FVRD says BC Transit will phase in the use of the new site over the coming years. But there are also a lot of bureaucratic hurdles. Officials must create a new “transit facility master plan” and an array of other paperwork. The FVRD says that plan will lead to business cases for funding applications, approvals from local government (the City of Chilliwack), and hopefully federal funding for the project.

BC Transit bought the property for an undisclosed sum, but industrial land is incredibly expensive in the Fraser Valley and the site was previously assessed at more than $17 million. The province will hope it can get the federal government to foot the bill to construct the rest of the facility. When Abbotsford got a new $29 million transit facility, much of the cost was borne by Ottawa through its Public Transit Infrastructure Fund. But the province and cities of Abbotsford and Mission were stuck with the cost of the land.

Share

You can share this newsletter by forwarding it or copy and pasting this link—https://fvcurrent.com/p/october-24-2024/—into a social media post.

🗓 Things to do this week/end

😅 Comedy for a cause: SARA for Women hosts its second annual comedy night fundraiser Oct. 24 at The Hub at Central Park Village in Abbotsford. Katie-Ellen Humphries headlines. Tickets online.

🎤 Coffeehouse music: The Mission Coffeehouse Concert Series features local musician Rebecca Sichon on Saturday, Oct. 26 at 7pm. (Sichon's father is musical madman Boris Sichon, who we profiled here.) Advance tickets are $15; tickets at the door are $20. Details online.

📚 Big, big book sale: The Chilliwack Rotary Club hosts its huge annual book sale Oct. 27 to Nov. 2 at Chilliwack Heritage Park. Details online.

Want even more? Insider members get a comprehensive events listing every Thursday, plus a weekly Saturday round-up edition with behind-the-scenes content. Becoming a member costs less than $2 a week and helps support the ongoing production of The Current’s newsletters and in-depth journalism. Become a member here.

Have an event to tell us about? Fill out this form to have it highlighted here.

Catch up

That’s it!

Thanks for reading Fraser Valley Current today ♥️ 

If you found something useful, consider forwarding this newsletter to another local.

And before you go, please let us know: