Bowen Bulletin

When asked, “Did you go to the unveiling of the Snug Cove Plan?”
George and Alice replied, “No, we don’t go to those anymore.”

Last Saturday, a new Snug Cove Master Plan was unveiled by our latest crew of high powered consultants. It hasn’t been posted on-line anywhere yet so I’m going from memory but here are a few of my impressions.

Basically, when it comes to Snug Cove planning there are four groups of people on Bowen. There are those who don’t want to see anything done. There are those who are so tired of decades of inaction that any plan would be welcome. Then there are those who like the idea of village but they would like to see any new development further up the hill. They see the lower cove as a ferry terminal and figure that it would be easier to spread the village along Miller and Dorman and up the hill. Then there is the fourth group who would like to see buildings on both sides of Government Road. It is this group who will be praising this plan.

Government Road would be narrower. The north side of the street would have four storey buildings. Behind them would be parking and access lanes and behind them would be two lanes of blacktop taking the offloading ferry traffic up the hill. The ferry traffic would hit Miller Road just past the RCMP station. This new road would then cross Miller and join up with the Trunk Road on the hill below the school.  
The area included in the new plan extends out to the highways yard and past Cates Chapel. It also includes the hillside on Dorman Road above the Sewage Plant and along Miller Road. When fully built out, there will be 600 to 700 additional living units in this expanded village area. Of course it could take 30 or 40 years for this all to happen but this is a long-term, visionary plan.

The first phase of this plan appears to be the development of the surplus parkland along Miller Road. It’s beautiful land, easy to develop, on a main road, quite level, and it backs onto a park. With the rationale for high density development already established, it should be the easiest proposal to sell to the public. On the plus side, we have a spot where we can build affordable and senior’s housing mixed with normal market units. The municipality already owns the land. Selling it should easily pay off the $2,000,000 debt we incurred when we bought the Surplus Lands. If enough density is allowed, the developer should be able to subsidize the non-market units.
On the negative side, we have the discord that this proposal is bound to spark within our community. Bowen has always resisted high density development. In fact, the argument has often been made that we would be betraying our Islands Trust mandate if we allowed our  island to be developed like any other small town being sucked into a huge metropolitan area.

What else might we see right away? The plan envisions 200 more parking spots. Some of them are along the sewage pipeline that runs from the treatment plant along the south side of Snug Cove to the ocean. Maybe that can be done. It would interest me to see if commuters really would park behind the festival field and walk to the ferry. Possibly council will look at selling the more outlying surplus land to fund civic facilities or upgrading the sewage treatment plant. Beyond that, not much really appears to be very immediate.

There were a couple of ferry loading options but I got the impression that B.C. Ferries didn’t like either of them. Most of the land on the north side of Government Road is in Crippen Park so the GVRD has to be on board with the loop road. They stand to make a fortune selling lots for those four storey buildings so who knows how that will go. The owners of property on the south side of the street still can’t do anything. I didn’t see any indication of new parking that would allow them to redevelop their buildings. The exception to this is the pub building and the old gas station site. These properties are waiting on an upgrade to the sewage system but nothing appears to be happening on that front either.

Civic facilities are supposed to be a major part of the plan but all I got out of it was that they had looked at a lot of possibilities but hadn’t figured it out yet.

That’s about it, lots of pretty pictures, lots of eco-density stuff and explanations about how the best sustainability principals were incorporated into the plan. But, at the end of the day all I could think was that we are about to become Whistler by the Sea for visitors and a nice suburb with new condos for commuters.