Bowen Bulletin

Cape Roger Curtis, the saga continues.

Last November a comprehensive, professional poll was conducted. Here’s what the citizens of Bowen had to say.

We most value our environment with our access to nature, the forest, and the ocean. Not far behind is quiet/privacy and sense of community. Further down the list came things like rural setting, size of community, safe for children.

The things that we list as top-of-mind concern are development/overdevelopment, population growth, ferry and environment.

When asked if we agreed or disagreed with particular statements about life on Bowen 82% agreed that we need more affordable housing and 67% wanted more public access to waterfront. Only 30% of us felt that more growth and development was needed while more high-end housing development was perceived to be a need by 13% of those surveyed.

Looking ahead twenty years 86% of us see Bowen as a distinct community while 9% see us becoming a suburb of Vancouver.

The next section of the survey was concerned with Cape Roger Curtis (CRC). Only 3% of us said that we had heard little or nothing about the Cape while 86% had heard a lot. 60% or more of us, depending on the question, wanted at least 50% of the land protected from development and 50% of the shoreline reserved for public access.

It comes as no surprise that if you ask the public if they want something for nothing they’ll go along with it. If you asked the owners you could confidently predict that the majority of them would respond that property owners should have the right to develop their property without giving half of it away.

Conversely municipal councils exist to represent the public interest. The only use entitlement any of us have to our land is what is allowed in the Land Use Bylaw. If we want to do something more, we must convince our Municipal Council that what we want is in the public interest. It usually isn’t, so we offer amenities to sweeten the deal. At the end of the negotiations Council must be able to say to their electorate that, on balance the public interest was served. Of course some changes in land use are exactly what the community needs and others will never fly no matter what amenities are offered.

And where are we with this process when it comes to Cape Roger Curtis? It appears to have reached at least a temporary stalemate. Wolfgang Duntz, the owners’ representative is asking Council for assurances that the rezoning and subdivision process will be allowed to proceed in a timely manner. Unfortunately for him, the status quo works just as well for most of the community as moving forward does.
He points to a 60 lot subdivision application that the owners made in November 2004. The Municipality has never processed it. Now, this is where it gets complicated. The owners don’t want to subdivide the property into 60 lots; they want to rezone the property.  But they want Council to approve the 60 lot plan so that they have a backup if no deal can be reached with Council on a comprehensive plan. Having an approved subdivision plan in hand would strengthen the owners’ bargaining position and thereby, by definition, weaken the Municipality’s position. On top of this is the fact that it takes time for municipal staff to review any subdivision plan and it seems counterproductive to work on one that the proponent says they don’t want to see go ahead.

In a recent interview Mr. Duntz is paraphrased as saying that there is an imbalance when entering into negotiations. In exchange for receipt of the 60 lot subdivision approval that he doesn’t want…“the developer will give his word that no work will be done on the land until the process concludes.”  One has to ask “What work?” This is a Development Permit Area.

The new Council has let it be known that what they’re expecting in the way of Community amenity is miles away from anything that the developer has yet proposed. There is a clash of wills here that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Developers are generally patient people by necessity. They place huge bets, against odds that would terrify most of us and then slowly work away at turning their dreams into reality and profit. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes decades. However, at certain intervals they have to redo their cost-benefit analyses. On one hand the potential profits on a project like Cape Roger Curtis are easily in the tens of millions of dollars. On the other hand it probably costs over a million dollars a year to carry the project and waiting for a more malleable Council might be a fool’s game.

I say all of this because, while we all agree that this is a major issue, it appears to be consuming Council at the expense of the rest of our Municipal agenda. In truth there isn’t very much in the way of new information to put on the table. If the developer wants to know what amenity they could offer that would move this project forward its pretty simple, these guys want a park and it better be big.