Bowen Island council will meet with the Islands Trust Executive Committee prior to Oct. 24 to discuss the group’s assessment of the proposed Cape Roger Curtis park bylaw amendments.
The bylaw application by Metro Vancouver is required to allow overnight camping at their newly-purchased 97 hectares of land at the Cape, and requires amendments to both Bowen’s Official Community Plan (OCP) and Land Use Bylaw (LUB). During their Aug. 25 meeting the Islands Trust Executive Committee (ITEC) identified 10 parts of the potential bylaw changes which ran contrary to the group’s policy statement.
In a response letter to the ITEC, Mayor Andrew Leonard wrote he “largely agrees with many of their comments and concerns,” saying the issues raised are ones Bowen’s council has been discussing amongst themselves and with Metro Vancouver. Though the mayor added that “What I didn’t see at the ITEC was a couple of things: one was a consideration of the work that this council has already done between the drafting of first reading and the July 10 Committee of the Whole.” This includes a list of additional conditions chosen at that meeting the municipality would like to see MetroVan fulfill as part of their application. MetroVan recently responded to the list, which will be discussed at Bowen’s next council meeting on Monday.
The ITEC was particularly concerned over the social impacts a campground could have on the island. Leonard pointed out that many other islands under the Islands Trust umbrella have their own campsites and other recreation amenities. “How are high versus low-use recreational facilities and their associated social impacts determined?” was another question the mayor felt the ITEC needed to address in more detail.
The mayor said he hopes the yet-to-be scheduled meeting can take place in-person, adding council has already been trying to meet with the ITEC for several months on other matters including the opinion poll in last year’s municipal election. Manager of planning and development Daniel Martin said he feels some of the ITEC’s concerns could be addressed during that meeting, but others are more challenging. “The ITEC reviewed the referral and viewed that a campground that allows 460 campers changes the character of the community. That’s the ITEC determination that it doesn’t meet their policy statement, so it’s challenging to address without changing the scale of the development proposal,” he pointed out as one example.
While looking forward to the meeting, Leonard says he doesn’t want council and staff to be doing all the work on the application. “We’ve spent a lot of time on this, and I don’t know how much more time we can spend on this before some kind of resolution is had. But what I do not want us to be getting in the middle of is really what the Islands Trust says is non-compliant and then working on behalf of an applicant (MetroVan) – who we still don’t know what their intentions are – to make something compliant,” said Leonard, stating the Islands Trust or MetroVan need to figure out what would make the bylaw application compliant.
