The Cape Roger Curtis (CRC) development proposal is becoming worrisome. Their 1000 unit proposal was a non starter. But, instead of listening to criticism and reworking their plan they just cut the number of proposed units by 50%. When that didn’t fly they proposed phasing the project so that the initial work was 50% less again. What they do not seem to be getting is that no car oriented residential suburb with hundreds of units is going to be acceptable. In fairness to the CRC people it was the municipality that suggested a very large park dedication and asked the developer what they wanted in return. The developer has told us and we can’t live with it. Now we have to look at what we can forego to get the unit count down.
This is where some out of the box thinking is required. What if we took the bluffs above the south shore, one of the most important environmental protection areas, and created a nature preserve. A strata corporation could own the entire area. The owners of the strata corporation could live in very tightly defined locations within the reserve. However, should the strata owners stray onto the common property they would be subject to serious sanctions. The municipality would mitigate the damages done to the natural area and send the bill to the strata corporation who would charge the individual strata owner. Consider for a moment how much you would be willing to pay to be one of the strata owners. You would have a ½ acre lot set in the middle of protected forest. Your home would have an uninterrupted south facing view of Georgia Straight. There would be several acres of forest between you and your nearest neighbour. The forest around you would not be open to the public or anybody else. You would have agreed to preserve and protect the natural area around your home. My bet is that you could find 20 or 30 people who would pay something over a million dollars each for this opportunity. And I doubt that these would be the type to build trophy homes. I imagine them more as people with money who value privacy and nature. Why would we prefer this situation over a public park? For starters we don’t have the resources to police a nature preserve of hundreds of acres. If 500 houses get built within a stones throw of environmentally sensitive areas how are we going to keep it from being destroyed? We don’t have the resources to maintain our existing roads, let alone our trails. Its one thing to take on public parks for people to use, its quite another to take ownership of property that is specifically meant to be left untouched.
The waterfront park from the beach to the lighthouse is not negotiable. The people of Bowen have made it very clear that this area must remain open to the public. Any proposal from the developer which does not include this will be rejected. As you hear the various arguments made on each side of this debate you can be confident that this won’t change. Another area that doesn’t appear to have been thought out is our growing need for high-end townhouse style development. A lot of us are reaching an age where we don’t want or need a large house with a lot. But we do want someplace nice and we’d like to stay on Bowen if we can. (Sound familiar?) There are bluffs facing west just south of Tunstall Bay. The views are fantastic. It strikes me as the logical place on Bowen to try this type of development. The people moving into it are unlikely to be commuters. If you worked in Vancouver every day and wanted to live in a townhouse you certainly wouldn’t have to travel so far to find some place to live.
The interesting part of the developer’s proposal is a little village near the beach. It is supposed to include a small hotel and a senior’s care facility of some type. I think that it would be fair to give them extra density based on the number of jobs created in this village area. The idea would be that we would approve 20 or 30 units for the south shore, 20 or 30 units for the western bluffs, the hotel, the care home and say 50 units of quite high residential density in the little village. All they give us is the waterfront park, maybe a playground and enough raw land to provide future local community amenities. After they’ve finished their first phase we’ll look at it again and see how many direct jobs have been created within the village and approve more residential density based on how well they’ve done. Their proposal includes 1.4 kilometres of new road just to get from Adams Road to the edge of their property. Once this road is in you can bet that there will be another application to create a bunch of lots along it creating a whole new subdivision between Sunset and Whitesails. The impact of that potential development has to be considered if it remains part of the CRC proposal. As part of reducing the scale of this project maybe the road should be axed.
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