Welcome to the Ball Park. This isn’t a place for baseball. This is where people negotiate about numbers. This is where things are either in the ballpark or they’re not. This is a place where you either play ball or you don’t. This is where the citizens of Bowen Island find themselves playing a very bizarre game with the Cape Roger Curtis Development team. We’ll just call them CRC.
The game was weird right from the beginning. CRC threw out the first number – 60 as in 60 lots on 630 acres of land. Then they threw out another number – 122 lots with 418 acres of open space. In retrospect, if the Bowen team had been smart they would have sat down, played ball and tried to tie up the deal. But the negotiating game doesn’t work that way, especially when the playing field is on Bowen Island. We take home field advantage very seriously and dragging the game out is half the fun.
So we yelled “Forget it. You’re trying to give us the cheap acres, you’re keeping the nice ones for trophy homes and you want to fence off a piece of paradise that should be Public Park.” We had them on the run. The game was heating up nicely. We sent in the ecological reserve squad who argued that the sensitive ecosystem of the south bluff had to be protected. We sent in the neighbours who protested that their street would become a gravel truck portal for the next decade if the project went ahead. We sent in a crew who named a nearby wetland “fairy fen” and fought any attempt to build a road anywhere near it.
CRC was on the ropes. They started building chain-link fences, putting in a security trailer and building a road to nowhere just to prove that they could do it. You could smell their desperation all the way across the island. Then they screamed “Uncle”. The gates flew open and folk singers were hired to greet all their Bowen Island neighbours. The old negotiating team was fired. Peace and reconciliation was the order of the day. Hardball was replaced with slow-pitch. And we fell for it.
CRC dedicated themselves to the most sensitive, in-depth, citizen friendly consultative process that any of us could imagine. Huge, glossy full coloured pictures of white haired ladies riding bikes with baskets of fresh vegetables were laid out for us. They were going to create a sustainable, eco-friendly model neighbourhood. All we had to do was approve 1000 living units on the CRC lands. We screamed, we yelled, we implored. We wanted the ecological reserve they promised. We wanted the west coast waterfront park. We wanted the affordable housing and the money for a community complex but 1000 units would destroy everything that Bowen Island stood for.
Armed with the input from everybody who had anything to say the developer and consultants went away for six months. A few weeks ago the head consultant, working on behalf of the Bowen Island Municipality, presented a proposed amendment to our Official Community Plan that would facilitate the building of 114 affordable housing units. Of course these units would only be 15% of the total development, which means that the total floor area of the proposed build out would be enough to accommodate 760 residential units. But before you get too excited about this you have to remember that CRC only has enough water to service a maximum of 215 homes.
There are several other absurdities in the proposal. Ecologically sensitive areas are now to be quarter acre lots, the ecological reserve isn’t the area originally designated and the west side park has turned back into houses. But the real absurdity is that our Municipal Council gave first reading to this proposal. After 18 months of the developer completely ignoring everything that the community suggested, we will now be asked what we think of the proposed amendment to our bylaws.
So how did we get here? Consultants. With two or three notable exceptions all of the people sitting at the table negotiating this deal were from the mainland. 760 units on 630 acres is a no brainer. It’s a great deal for everybody. That is of course unless you understand that most of the future residents will have to take a ferry every day or that the population of this island has never increased by over 100 people per year.
This is where we separate the players from the watchers. Remember that ballpark we were talking about. The numbers in that ballpark were 60 to 122. Now we’re playing in a ballpark where the numbers range from 215 to 760. Think about how negotiations are going to go.
“We don’t want a 150,000 sq. ft. Seniors Home.”
“OK we’ll take it out.”
“We don’t want that hotel.”
“It’s gone.”
“We demand those parks.”
“They’re yours.”
“We can’t live with 540 houses.”
“Are you crazy? We’ve given you everything. We’ll be bankrupt if we can’t build those.”
Therein lays the power of moving the ballpark from Bowen Island to Metro Vancouver. We may think that we are players, but the reality is that all we will be able to do is watch unless we regain control of the process. And the only way to do that is to kill this bylaw before any public process sham can get off of the ground.
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