Bowen Bulletin

So I went to a council meeting where they were going to talk about the Cape Roger Curtis proposal. I had written one of the reports that were being discussed so several people asked me to get up and speak during the time set aside for public comments. Remind me never to do that again; I was a bumbling idiot. I would like to try to explain here what I was trying to say there.

First of all I should try to clear up some misconceptions. Cape Roger Curtis (CRC) is a single building lot. It is over 600 acres but it is still just one lot. The owners have exactly the same rights as the rest of us have on our lots; they can build a house. But the people who purchased the lot in 2004 have no desire to build a house. They want to subdivide the property into a number of lots and sell them. In September of 2004 they applied to the Approving Officer for permission to subdivide the property into 60 parcels of ten acres each. The Approving Officer is a bureaucrat who is responsible for ensuring that the subdivision proposal not only conforms to existing laws and current conventions but also ensures that the subdivision is not contrary to the public interest. On top of that, the Approving Officer considers the “preserve and protect” mandate of the Islands Trust and the municipal council’s statement of public interest.

After reviewing the subdivision application, the Approving Officer issues a Preliminary Layout Review (PLR) that outlines a number of the conditions that the property owner must meet. In July of 2006 the first PLR for CRC was issued. In order to address the many deficiencies noted the owner submitted a revised application asking for 58 lots. By January of 2007  it had become apparent that some of the problems with the 60 lot application were still not fixed in the 58 lot proposal.

The owners then abandoned the subdivision route in favour of a comprehensive rezoning, but they haven’t actually applied for permission to rezone the land. Instead they opted for a more protracted process and, in September of 2008 Municipal Council gave first reading to a by-law that would amend the Island’s Official Community Plan (OCP) to incorporate the developers “Neighbourhood Plan” into Bowen’s OCP. The intent at the time was to proceed with a public process to establish whether or not the community would agree to an OCP amendment and then, if it went through, start on a rezoning application.

Now events have overtaken the process. Council is spending $120,000 on a full update of the OCP and this development proposal should be part of it. You can’t plan your building lot requirements for the next five years (about 150) in the OCP update while you’re considering granting 666 units of density in an OCP amendment and carry on both public processes at the same time. But council is seriously considering doing just that.

“Why?” Here are some of the reasons given.

We have led the CRC owners on and wasted their time and they might sue us if we don’t have a public hearing. Of course they can’t sue us but the argument has been made.

If we don’t approve their plan they’ll go ahead with the 58-lot subdivision. People forget that there is no 58-lot subdivision. It died. The developers can and should revise their plan and apply again. People are assuming that we will lose access to the waterfront if a straightforward subdivision goes ahead. Until the developer submits a plan that is acceptable to the Approving Officer nothing is going to happen and it would be quite unlikely that a plan that cuts off the waterfront would be considered to protect the public interest and preserve and protect the unique character of the island for future generations of British Columbians. Also keep in mind that the development will have a lot more upland lots than waterfront. If the subdivision cuts off the waterfront from the other lot purchasers it will make those lots considerably less valuable. Tunstall Bay, Hood Point and Bowen Bay are all examples of subdivisions which provide public access to the beach and waterfront.

Of course the developer has another option; they could apply for a rezoning for something less than the OCP density limit of 224 lots. If the amenity package offered was acceptable to the Bowen Island community, they could proceed with their rezoning application and avoid the OCP amendment process all together. No matter what process the developers ultimately follow, it is going to be years before anything beyond a single house is built at CRC. The shame of the currently contemplated public process is that it is going to conflict with the broader OCP update.

Anyway, for those of you who were at the meeting and couldn’t figure out what the heck I was talking about, I hope this clears things up.