qathet Regional District’s planning committee is recommending the regional board direct staff to prepare a report on floor area and lot coverage ratios to determine how they may impact official community plan (OCP) density and housing policies.
At the November 1 planning committee meeting, Electoral Area B director Mark Gisborne initially brought forward a recommendation that the board direct staff to proceed with public engagement with proposed options for the Area B OCP changes to replace the density policies found in the OCP.
Gisborne said he had a good conversation with regional district manager of planning services Laura Roddan, and the problem with the motion he had originally proposed was that a step was missing.
“The motion in the agenda is to ask to go to public engagement for the Area B OCP about floor area ratio and lot coverage, but I’ve put forward an alternate motion to ask for a staff report on floor area ratio and lot coverage ratio to determine how they might impact OCP diversity in housing,” said Gisborne. “The alternative motion might be easier for staff to work with. Housing is an interesting issue that we have in our community. The Local Government Act defines density as density of the use of the land or parcel, or the density of use of buildings or other structures.”
Gisborne said the Local Government Act doesn’t define where density has to be a number of dwelling units or whether it is defined as a number of people. He said the act does require that the OCP has policies around density.
“We can’t just say you can do whatever you want; we have to have some density policies,” said Gisborne. “When you get to a rural area, especially ours where you don’t have building permits, it can be a little bit challenging to determine what is the total floor area inside a structure when we don’t really get into what is inside the structure. A building coverage might actually serve us better. This proposed policy can enable more flexibility.”
Gisborne said the number of dwellings per unit area does not distinguish the size of the structure. He said when it comes to water and sewer use, those are based by Vancouver Coastal Health on the number of bedrooms. He said what the proposed policy change could be used to do is to enable a property owner to know their limits and build within it.
“This motion is simply to ask for the staff report on floor area ratio and lot coverage, and how that could be used to impact our OCP policy,” said Gisborne. “This motion is more palatable for us because if we go to do an OCP public engagement and we’re asking our staff to talk to the public about floor area ratio and lot coverage, if we haven’t received the report yet, the public might ask questions and staff might say they don’t know the answers.”
Electoral Area A director and committee chair Jason Lennox said he was in support and appreciated Gisborne’s thought processes to actually get the information people are going to need for public consultation.
Electoral Area D director Sandy McCormick asked how floor area ratio and lot coverage ratio is currently used in the planning process, and whether the recommendation varies from what is currently done.
Roddan said lot coverage ratio is a concept that is applied in a number of the regional district’s zoning bylaws. She said currently, that language is not reflected in any of the regional district’s OCPs.
“However, there may be merit to incorporating that, but I think staff needs to do some study so that we can develop a common understanding on what the tools and possibilities are,” added Roddan.
The committee unanimously carried the motion for the staff report.
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