OCP evolves into a 2010 exercise

The 2009 Official Community Plan is becoming a 2010 plan.

The 2009 Official Community Plan is becoming a 2010 plan.

Another public meeting on the document, which acts as an overall planning guide for the city, won’t be held until at least January.

The decision comes after city management met with councillors at noon Tuesday to discuss the final process for the review of the document now underway.

As planner Mike Ellis explained, after an extensive consultation period which included stakeholder and public meetings along with consultation through the city’s website for the review, staff have come up with 55 recommendations for changes to the document.

“In general, we’re hoping to simplify this OCP,” Ellis said.

City council members at Tuesday’s meeting (Mayor Bev Buckway was absent) were presented with a workbook detailing each of the changes.

However, the recommendations won’t be publicly released until next Thursday, before council meets for a three-hour session to discuss each one.

With the workbooks, council members were each given a feedback paper to let planners know what they think of each proposed change and asked to have it in by next Tuesday, two days before the council and management meeting on the changes.

That would have been followed by a public open house, tentatively set for Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, until Coun. Doug Graham suggested the document was being rushed.

“This happens time and time again,” he said. Council can end up being pushed into making a quick decision and having to live with those repercussions for the next few years, he argued.

“There’s no (need to) rush.”

While Ellis said there is some flexibility with timelines and that it’s a document worth spending time on, a delay would likely move the adoption date from next spring to next summer.

At the same time, delaying the public open houses from Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 to a January date would give council the month of December to explore the new plan.

Ellis did note staff had been planning to work on any changes coming out of the meetings with council and the public through December.

It had been suggested that council consider whether to have the public meeting in late November at its meeting on the OCP next week.

However, as Rob Fendrick, the director of administrative services, pointed out, advertising has to be booked very soon, and next week will be too late to do so.

With that, councillors agreed to have their meeting next week, but hold off on the pubic meeting until January.

Acting Mayor Dave Stockdale also suggested that during the meeting, city staff spend a half-hour doing a public presentation to explain the proposal, arguing that having an open house with no presentation is a bit like walking through a museum where you might look at one display and not another.

A half-hour presentation would help ensure residents aren’t just “in a void” when they look at the panels and information on the proposed changes.

Included in the latest edition of the OCP will be a greenspace network plan setting out the city’s greenspace.

Following the adoption of the OCP, the city will begin reviewing its zoning bylaw to bring it in line with the larger planning document.