Consultation with Neighbourhoods

Consultation with the neighbourhoods has been particularly challenging since 2007 when EcoDensity was first implemented in Norquay.

The City is moving away from CityPlan Terms of Reference for community planning and are in the process of creating a new set of plans for the communities that have exisitng Local Area Plans.

The new planning process is coming forward to Council July 28, 2011. The details and further information are as follows.

______________________

Vancouver’s next Community Plans addressed in the Administrative Report dated July 15, 2011, will be considered by Vancouver City Council’s Standing Committee on Planning and Environment at its meeting on:

DATE:

Thursday, July 28, 2011

TIME:

2:00 pm

PLACE:

Council ChamberThird Floor, City Hall

Report: http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110728/documents/penv1b-VancouversNextCommunityPlans.pdf

Agenda: http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20110728/penv20110728ag.htm

If you wish further information on this matter, please contact Matt Shillito at 604.871.6431.  If you wish to address the Standing Committee, please call me at 604.873.7268, by 1:00 pm on Wednesday, July 27, 2011.  Please note speakers are requested to limit their comments to no longer than five minutes.

You may also communicate your thoughts on the issue to the Mayor and Councillors by emailing mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

For your information, all meetings of Council are webcast and can be viewed at: vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/mayorcouncil/councilmeetings/video.htm.  The minutes for this meeting can be viewed at: vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/councilmeetings/meeting_schedule.cfm approximately two days following the meeting.  Hard copies of the minutes are available upon request.

This report has city-wide implications. For example, on page 11 of the staff report it states as follows (emphasis ours):

City-wide Plan – A first step

Community plans operate within a policy hierarchy which includes provincial/regional and city-wide policy. It is also evident that planning at multiple geographical scales simultaneously is critical to tackling the challenges facing the city and addressing new issues as they emerge. In this context, staff notes that there are compelling reasons to begin work on a city-wide land use and physical plan in the near future.

These reasons include:

  • The statutory requirement to provide the City’s response to the new Regional Growth Strategy (known as a Regional Context Statement) within two years of adoption of the strategy.
  • The need to coordinate land use planning with other city-wide initiatives which are either recently completed or ongoing, such as the Transportation Plan 2040, Housing and Homelessness Strategy, Greenest City Action Plan, Economic Development Strategy, etc.
  • The desire to create, for the first time, a coherent physical plan for the whole city to provide a clear and resilient framework to guide land use and development decisions.

Staff anticipate reporting to Council in early 2012 with a proposed strategy for the preparation of a city-wide plan, including information on the recommended scope of work, timing, and resourcing. Staff would ensure that such a program is carefully coordinated with ongoing community planning initiatives, including the next community plans, and that all planning at different scales informs and aligns with each other. As noted above, as a first step towards this coordination staff will distill from existing Council-adopted policy documents (CityPlan, Greenest City, EcoDensity, etc) a set of draft city-wide principles to guide the next community plans. It is anticipated that these principles would be considered and possibly enhanced as an early phase in the city-wide plan process.”

The above text from the report clearly shows how this planning process will influence city-wide planning processes.

It also shows how city-wide and regional policies will have a large influence on local area plans.

This planning process appears to be designed to implement city-wide policies such as the controvercial STIR Program by designing the proposed development into the Community Plan in advance like what they have done in the first neighbourhood to get a Community Plan, Mt. Pleasant, in the STIR proposal at Kingsway and Broadway.