Considering that we’re moving into the dog days of summer, there’s quite a bit happening. The Cape Roger Curtis is back in the news and the bureaucrats at municipal hall are quietly doing a little bureaucracy building. On the other hand a plan for maintaining our roads is finally emerging and the building boom is positively moderate.
The continuing saga of the Cape Roger Curtis (CRC) subdivision proposal is getting interesting again. First of all there is the current tempest in a teapot. The owners applied for and received a permit to put in a driveway that could stretch across half of the property. The catch was that they had to put in the access at the end of the public road by mid July at the latest. They did put in a driveway, but it’s only 200 feet long. There are reports of a fence at the end of Whitesails. It’s about three feet high, 50 feet long and not across the path. There is a trailer on site and the owners have applied for permission to run underground services to a security trailer. Some are assuming that they plan to stop people from trespassing. If that’s the case there are going to a lot of jobs to be had patrolling their 640 acres.
Enough silliness, here is the real news. The Municipal Approving Officer has issued a Preliminary Layout Review (PLR) to the owners of CRC for subdivision of the property into 10 acre parcels. A PLR is a list of conditions laid out by the Municipality. If the developer meets the conditions the subdivision proceeds. You may recall that the owners applied for this subdivision back in 2004 but the Municipality seemed to pretty much ignore it. The logic at the time was that both the owners and the Municipality agreed that the property should be rezoned and a comprehensive development plan put in place. The issuing of this PLR appears to be a complete repudiation of the Municipality’s position. It looks like they lost their nerve and bowed to the developer’s pressure. Here’s where it gets interesting. We don’t know what the PLR says. It may contain conditions that demonstrate to the developer the wisdom of going for a rezoning. However, the situation now is that the developer always has the fallback option of going ahead with the PLR and abandoning other options.
So when will we get to see this document? Good question. Normally PLRs are sent from the Municipality to the developer and nobody else cares very much. Rarely does anybody ask for a copy. Conversely staff certainly had no problem discussing publicly conditions of the latest Artisan Square PLR. The legal opinion I received was that PLRs are public documents and not subject to protection of privacy legislation. The chief administrative officer of the Municipality takes the position that there may be grounds in this case so she has asked the proponent for permission to release the document and, if they have good reasons to keep it private, then she will submit it to the Information and Privacy Commissioner for a ruling. All of this could take two or three months. We’ll pick up this story then.
Meanwhile, back at municipal hall, council approved the creation of a position call “deputy treasurer”. The person filling this position will be the payroll clerk which was a position created out of the part-time payroll clerk position. The additional $9,000 required to fund this position will be taken from the council contingency fund. Councillors Frinton and Morse voted against the motion. This move is reminiscent of the decision to renovate municipal hall to provide space for a new senior planner. Actually a junior planner was hired. When the original planner left a few months latter the junior planner became the senior planner and the funding approved for the second planner disappeared into contingency reserves. Meanwhile, the additional office space created was soon filled by somebody from the recreation department.
On to more uplifting news. They actually have a plan to fix the roads. It looks like $300,000 will be spent on road repairs this year and a total of $1,000,000 over the next three years. One interesting part of the plan is the “traffic calming devices” proposed for spots such as the Collins Hall curves. One wonders if this is a euphemism for speed bumps or whether they’ll do something more creative.
The other interesting thing is the report from the building inspector. A lot of people are renovating houses but the actual number of new houses being built remains consistent at about 32 houses per year. This is down from our building heydays in the early 1990s when over 40 houses were being built each year. From my perspective this is just about perfect. There is plenty of work for the builders on the island but we haven’t been swamped with runaway development. Of course that could still change and it isn’t something that we should get too complacent about.
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