The Cape Roger Curtis development was almost the biggest thing to ever hit our island. However, at their April 20 meeting our council rescinded the bylaw that would have made the Neighbourhood Plan (NP) possible. The developers will now choose whether to apply for a rezoning that fits within our Official Community Plan with up to 224 lots or apply for subdivision approval, which restricts development to lots that are a minimum of ten acres. This would result in the creation of somewhere between 40 and 58 lots, depending on who you listen to. Of course they could do nothing and let things die down for a while but nobody is betting on that.
Before moving on to more interesting things a brief post-mortem of the process that led to the demise of the NP is in order. The developers spent over two years and two million dollars on their sales pitch. They had strong support from our planners, at least two members of council and a very dedicated, if small group of local citizens. At the end of the day, I believe that it was only the overwhelming opposition expressed by the public that killed the deal so completely. In last week’s Undercurrent Shari Ulrich credited me with being the driving force behind the opposition. While I appreciate the compliment, I really can’t take the credit. The “100 for Bowen” campaign was put together by a very diverse group of islanders who all believed that the proposed development was simply too big. At the end of the day 669 Bowen Islanders signed up to have their names included in an advertisement that denounced the NP. It was a wonderful example of how a grass-roots movement can prevail over a well-financed communications machine.
Now that CRC is on the back burner for a while, attention is shifting to our Official Community Plan Update. We have a steering committee in place and will soon have a hired consultant to help us through the process. Over the next year you are going to have the opportunity to study up on current community development jargon and get involved in what is bound to be a pretty lively debate. Our current OCP is based on how we saw the world in 1992. But things have changed dramatically. The mechanisms put in place to ensure a socially diverse rural community are now turning us into a high-end suburb.
The first decision that we will have to make is whether our worldview has changed and then we have to be creative enough to plan ways to find our niche in the world of 2015. Let me give you an example; most of us would agree that Bowen’s open forests are a defining feature of the island and one that we would like to maintain. In our current OCP large-lot zoning protects this goal. The idea was that people with 5 and 10-acre parcels would leave most of it as forest. But what has happened is that many 5-acre lots have been cleared and fenced. When you get ten or twenty of these together the island starts to look more like hobby farms than forest. If we, as a community agreed that this was a bad thing we might decree that no residential lots could be over one acre in size and that the land surrounding each lot must be left in a wild state. Say you have 100 acres that is zoned for 10-acre lots. The OCP might be rewritten to envisage the day when you could create 20 lots at one-acre each, and clustered in two or three groups. This would allow 80 acres to remain as forest but allow the owner to create twice as many lots as otherwise envisioned. Servicing costs would be lower, small neighbourhoods would be created, transit would be more feasible and the overall appearance and feel of the island would be maintained.
Many people, from both sides of the political spectrum, will find all kinds of problems with a proposal so far outside of our usual way of looking at land use and subdivision. But my hope is that the OCP update process will take the time to vet some of the more extreme ideas and see if we can come up with something a little more visionary than the same old subdivision formulas that are no longer working out very well for us.
Other issues that are bound to come up include the possibility of commercial development on the Westside of the island and the question of just how much density we envision for Snug Cove. Cultures will once again collide. There will be the preservationists saying “I didn’t move to Bluewater to be next to a store.” And the pragmatists, “What’s wrong with a store if there’s enough demand for somebody to make a go of it?” You may not know yet which topics will get a rise out you but there’s good chance that something will. So, stay abreast of what’s happening and share your ideas when the time comes.
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