City of Powell River officials are kicking off a review of the official community plan (OCP) with an open house.
The introductory open house is being held from 5:30 to 8 pm on Thursday, January 31 in the Arbutus Room at Powell River Recreation Complex.
The city’s current OCP was completed in 2006 and was due for a review in 2011. Council designated a total budget of $164,300 for the development of the plan and $37,500 for clerical administration, to be funded from the community works funds reserve.
The new OCP will have a strong emphasis on sustainability, according to Carlos Felip, manager of development services, in a report to council, and will provide better guidance for future development and re-development of the city. The new approach should, as an example, increase the encouragement for a more compact approach to development, a more efficient approach to people’s movements and a better use of inner city lands.
Graham Farstad, a representative from The Arlington Group, the consulting company which was awarded the contract to develop the OCP, gave elected officials an update during the January 17 committee-of-the-whole meeting.
Farstad said the first phase of the project involves three key elements: a consultation strategy; background review and analysis; and a kickoff open house for the public.
The second phase deals with community vision, which involves a series of neighbourhood meetings. “We will first of all deal with the assets, the issues and challenges and the community vision, then we’ll go back to the same community with objectives and more detail in terms of policy,” he said.
The third component is getting into the very detailed aspects of the policies that implement the vision and objectives, Farstad added. “It involves an open house, a wide open house, and then the actual formal adoption process dealing with the public hearing and council adoption.”
Another tool the consultants will be using is surveys, Farstad said, which will be available online, along with documentation and summaries of meetings. “The guiding principles we have identified are to ensure a clear and transparent process,” he said. “We want to have an inclusive process, so the consultation strategy has identified about 16 different stakeholder groups and there will be others that we will be adding. We will be having a very diverse group of stakeholders, though as I mentioned the focus will be at the neighbourhood level.”
The introductory open house is a process that involves the three pillars of sustainability, Farstad said, “representation from the environmental, social, arts side and the economic development side. Those all contribute to sustainability and we want to bring stakeholders into that initial open house process and then move from there to the local neighbourhoods.”
Some of the objectives in the engagement are “to reach as many people and organizations as possible, leave the participants feeling that they understand the process, so there’s an education about community plans, but also, bottom up, to get input from people as to what they want to have considered,” Farstad said. “We can’t guarantee outcomes, but we will guarantee that everything will be considered.”
