Bowen Island isn’t a municipality; Bowen is an Island Municipality. We’re actually unique in this part of world. Municipalities are typically urbanized areas surrounded by unincorporated rural lands and sometimes crown land. There are usually provincially maintained roads that run to and often through the municipality.
Our Island Municipality is quite different. We’re surrounded by water; we will never expand our boundaries. Every bit of road we have, we maintain, and that’s about three times as many miles per capita as a municipality. We don’t abut crown land; we have thousands of acres of it in the middle of our island. Rural areas don’t surround us; they are an important part of what defines us.
The one thing that we do have in common with municipalities and unincorporated islands is that we are a community and every community in B.C. is required by law to have an Official Community Plan (OCP). Our current OCP was last reviewed through a process that started in 1992 and didn’t get final adoption until January of 1996. The time has come to do a complete update and the process is about to get underway.
For those of you who wouldn’t know an OCP if it bit you; it is a very comprehensive document that looks at every square inch of our community and attempts to articulate a rational plan for what we intend to change and what we intend to leave alone. It starts with an exploration of values; what we most value in our community and what we would most like to change. We marry that to some guiding principals to ensure that what we do is fair and equitable to everybody. We then look to other community plans and community planning professionals to see current best practises.
But we aren’t starting from scratch. We review our existing plan to see if it still reflects our values. In our case we live in a very different world than the one we dealt with in 1992. One example is how we might deal with the basic value of retaining open forest throughout the island. In 1992, the answer appeared to be large lot subdivisions. In those days a ten acre parcel was a homestead; today it could just as easily be a country estate. In 1992 the cost of fencing a ten acre lot was considered prohibitive. Today the idea isn’t so farfetched. Some other communities have dealt with this by changing their land use bylaws to require clustering of building lots in new developments. This gives the same total density but protects wildlife corridors. While some of this has been done on Bowen, it will be nice to see it incorporated into our long term planning.
Another aspect of an OCP review is trying to figure out what development opportunities might present themselves. The curse of long range planning is having something come along for which you have no terms of reference. This is why the OCP is supposed to be reviewed on an ongoing basis and why we would like to see the development proposals that are likely to come forward in the next few years. One way to understand this is to think of a large wholesale supply company. Every year they shut their doors for several days while they do a complete inventory of everything they have. Even though the closure costs them money and inconveniences their customers, they simply have to do it to get an accurate picture of where they are. An OCP review allows the municipality to look at a number of outstanding proposals, all of which would require an OCP amendment, put them in the context of our overall plan and adjust the OCP accordingly.
Currently, we have the Snug Cove Master Plan, the Cape Roger Curtis Neighbourhood Plan, King Edward Bay Phase 2, Bellterra and at least one or two more quite large and comprehensive proposals that will presumably be reviewed as part of the overall process. While each individual proposal may have merit on its own the trick is to figure out what the cumulative effect would be and which ones make the most sense when considered within the context of long term planning for the entire island.
Probably the most interesting part of this process is that municipal council will have very little to do with it. Dave Witty, Dean of Architecture at the University of Manitoba and Bowen Island resident will be chairing the steering committee. The work of the committee will be to listen to as many Bowen Islanders as possible and create a plan which best reflects our values and aspirations. In April of 2010, our revised OCP will be submitted to council for their consideration.
I’m looking forward to this process. It has been so long since we had a coherent plan for our future that we have lost our way and started to argue about which blind alley we should be following. It will be refreshing to know what the Island Municipality of Bowen really values and what we are willing to do preserve those values.
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