As Powell River Regional District prepares for a round of public engagement for the draft Area C official community plan (OCP), some residents have raised significant concerns about the entire process.
In a letter to the regional board dated September 17, David Moore, a resident of Area C, detailed a number of concerns with rural land-use planning, which he believes has been mishandled. The 11-page letter, which was written by Moore and signed by eight other residents of Areas B and C, raised 13 specific indications of planning committee dysfunction and requested responsibility for developing OCPs be transferred from the planning committee to the committee of the whole. Currently only directors representing four rural communities in the regional district sit on the planning committee.
Moore has been involved for four years with the public engagement process which began when the regional district initiated a review of the southern regional district OCP, which encompassed both Areas B and C. Residents from both Areas B and C have been bringing “our very legitimate concerns to the planning committee table for years now and they’ve never been properly dealt with,” said Moore. “We’ve given up, basically, on any hope that the planning committee can actually solve its own problems. It needs something from without to make a structural change to get things put in order.”
Moore said his letter to the board states that the issue with OCPs is a high enough level issue and broad enough issue that it really is the concern of all the directors on the board, not just the rural directors. “All the people of Powell River, for instance, have to drive from the [City of Powell River] boundary to Saltery Bay to go back and forth to the Lower Mainland,” he said. “They have to drive that 25 kilometres that’s gradually turning into a dog patch scene, one after the other, either that or clear-cuts.”
Moore’s letter was on the agenda of the September 19 board meeting. Colin Palmer, board chair and Area C director, told the board he had already had two comments that there are “slanderous comments” in the letter. “It worries me,” he said. “I’m not a lawyer, we haven’t discussed it with lawyers, but I’m a bit nervous about having people suggest to me there might be slanderous comments about individuals, not the board.”
In fact, slander refers to defamation that is spoken. Libel is defamation with a permanent record, such as a newspaper article, a letter, a website posting, an email, a picture or a
radio or TV broadcast.
Palmer said he wanted to get legal advice about whether the board should even discuss Moore’s letter. “If we start discussing it in a committee meeting and if somebody launches a law suit, who knows, I think we need some legal advice,” he said. “I don’t want the board to be caught in a situation where we might become party to discussing something when somebody is going to get privately upset.”
Directors agreed that Palmer could check with the regional district’s lawyer for advice and decided to refer the letter to the committee of the whole.
Some of the people who signed the letter attended the board meeting, including Moore, who said they felt a chill as a result of Palmer’s comments. Some of them still feel intimidated, he added.
Moore also said he has discussed the letter with Area A Director Patrick Brabazon, who is the chair of the regional district’s committee of the whole.
Brabazon wrote in an email to Moore that he feels there is nothing of a libellous nature in the letter, Moore said, although he stressed he was not a lawyer. Brabazon added he had no choice but to receive that letter into the committee-of-the-whole agenda because the board referred it there.
Meanwhile, the regional district has sent out a notice of the public engagement process for the draft Area C OCP.
There are two public meetings scheduled to discuss the plan, on Wednesday, October 10 and October 24. Both meetings will be held from 6 to 9 pm at Lang Bay Community Hall, located at 11090 Highway 101.
The draft Area C OCP has been prepared by regional district planning staff. It builds on work from the southern regional district OCP review.
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