Its official, the Snug Cove Village Plan (SCVP) is no longer a plan. I asked several councillors how you could call this a plan when it didn’t address any of the current problems such as parking and ferry congestion and they all had the same well-rehearsed answer “It is really more of a Vision Statement.” If I indulged in Orwellian allusions I would be tempted to add “brought to you by the Ministry of Truth.” Before we look at where this vision statement is taking us we have to understand how we got to this point.
At one stage in this process there was a Snug Cove Task Force. They came up with quite a good long-term plan for a compact, pedestrian friendly village with a town square and all kinds of good things. A critical element of their plan was redevelopment of the baseball field. When the baseball field was pulled from the plan, the plan fell apart.
But by this time the Municipal Council was involved. Snug Cove planning had been dragging on for years and they decided to get things moving. They brought in consultants, showed them the dead plan and told them to breathe new life into it. Drafts were written and rewritten. Background documents were distributed. Public consultation meetings were held. There was even a meeting at UBC where various plans were computer modeled. At the end of the day the entire exercise went nowhere. As long as the GVRD controlled the land on either side of the main street there was no way to fit a square village into a ribbon of land.
Then a bombshell fell. The GVRD was willing to sell the community over five million dollars worth of land for two million dollars. Council was divided. Some wanted to buy the land and figure it out later. Others wanted a plan in place before the purchase to ensure that council could sell enough of the land quickly to recoup the two million dollars. The upshot was that council agreed to pass the Snug Cove Plan before the next election to ensure that rezoning could proceed to enable the sale of some of the land.
From that point on the process took on a life of its own. Public input was still part of the process but the die was cast. There was absolutely no way that council was going to reverse itself.
They did strip out numerous parts of the plan. What remains is an undertaking to increase residential density along Miller Road, create high density residential on some of the Surplus Land, create commercial on some of the Surplus Land, create civic/institutional on some of the Surplus Land and, in an ironic twist, they are changing the nice, modest, high density little residential area behind the Pub from village residential to commercial.
Council could have said “Look we have all of this surplus land and we have to sell some of it to pay off the $2,000,000 mortgage. The SCVP is simply the first step in redrawing the planning maps to allow future councils to have the most possible options.” Instead, they tried to justify planning that could conceivably allow for a hundred and fifty multifamily units on ten acres of land. At every public meeting the majority of speakers spoke against this. The public clearly stated “If we are going to get off the ferry, drive up the hill and be greeted by the same urban development that we just spent an hour getting away from, what’s the point of living here?”
Now council is stuck and they’re scrambling. They’re emphasizing things like special needs housing but there is nothing in the Plan requiring it: It’s just part of a list of everything from half million dollar townhouses to rental units. They’ve also thrown in that the developer will have to provide a community benefit. Of course, in the vast majority of cases the Municipality will be the developer.
So now council is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they don’t pass their Vision Statement their critics will say that they frittered away another three years without finishing anything. If do pass it they are saddled with the public perception that they are pro development and without any real plan as to how to manage that development.
The only member of council to distance herself from the Plan is the Mayor. She is also by far the most astute politician. When election time rolls around this November the public may come to realize that the Snug Cove Village Plan process was just a torturous route to a necessary starting point. But I don’t think that those involved will forgive Council for inviting them to get up at public meetings and express their views when it didn’t really matter what they said.
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