City councils across the Lower Mainland are rapidly approving a regional growth strategy (RGS) that opponents fear will create urban sprawl, an expensive and more bureaucratic governance structure and entrenched power for unelected representatives.
Most municipalities have already passed the controversial plan, but upcoming votes are expected in:
- Coquitlam (March 21);
- North Vancouver District (March 21); and
- Maple Ridge (March 22).
The RGS requires approval from 20 municipal councils, the Squamish Lillooet Regional District, Fraser Valley Regional District and the Tsawwassen First Nation.
Supporters say Metro Vancouver’s RGS will do a better job of protecting industrial land and jobs than does the current Livable Region Strategic Plan (LRSP). They add that the RGS also makes planning more consistent across civic boundaries.
“The biggest difference between the old plan and the new plan is the protection of industrial land,” said Christina DeMarco, who is Metro Vancouver’s division manager for regional development.
City councils across the region have exclusive power to rezone industrial land. If the RGS becomes law, municipal councils will have to convince a majority of Metro Vancouver board members that the rezoning is warranted.
DeMarco rejected arguments from community activists such as Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver organizer Ned Jacobs that the RGS will create urban sprawl, a pricy bureaucracy and new power for the unelected TransLink board.
Jacobs said that under the RGS Metro Vancouver board members could redesignate land zoned as a “special study area” – mostly agricultural land – with a simple majority vote.
Currently, that approval requires a two-thirds Metro Vancouver board majority.
But DeMarco said the Agricultural Land Commission would first have to remove the land from the agricultural land reserve (ALR).
Jacobs fears housing development could encroach further up the North Shore mountains above West Vancouver and on other non-ALR land designated as a “special study area.”
But DeMarco said the North Shore land is protected by what she called a “context statement” in the West Vancouver official community plan. It states that land more than 1,200 feet above sea level is to be used almost entirely for conservation and recreation.
Jacobs is also afraid that the RGS’s regulatory approach for governing land use (as opposed to what he called the current “leadership approach” that is less grounded in written rules) will add bureaucrats and other costs that will have to be paid for with higher property taxes, development cost levies and regional community amenity contributions.
But DeMarco stressed that her department has no plans to hire staff and that she has a smaller budget this year than she did in 2010.
Allowing TransLink’s unelected board to be defined in the RGS as an “affected local government,” she said, is merely an acknowledgement of its current status.
TransLink’s status, however, stems from the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Act, which was written in the late 1990s when TransLink’s board was made up of elected Greater Vancouver Regional District representatives.
“Population growth and pressures facing the region have changed dramatically over the past 15 years, so the old [LRSP] needed to be updated,” Vancouver councillor Geoff Meggs told Business in Vancouver.
“The new plan, while probably not perfect, really is a dramatic improvement [over the LRSP]. We, as a council, do lose a bit of autonomy to rezone industrial land, but we gain more security that industrial land will be protected regionally.”
See “Tax cuts needed for rental housing” – Peter Ladner’s At Large column, page 36.