OCP Process to Date - Letter from Peter Long

A letter from Peter Long to OCP -

The Café process was interesting but flawed. People are saying to develop in wetlands, put gravel pits in subdivisions and subdivisions on first nation lands. Asking people to plot where our city should develop in the future with crude maps and a multitude of ill-fitting overlays was poor and should be considered unprofessional.

You easily have enough staff to set up a process for INFORMED decision-making at these community meetings. Just imagine how productive, and fun, a meeting would be then!!

(The maps in this step of the process are designed to not be analysed. For instance, the downtown height map is incomprehensible. Are blue/light blue to be low height/high height? Are non-blue to be anything goes? What about using a real legend for the map?

Generally, where are land selections, existing park boundaries, wetlands, industrial areas, elevation, sewage, dump, Hamilton Extension, land totally unsuitable for development..... Why can't we have a proper base map and a series of overlays that show what the options are. Most people don't have the capability of making overlays and digging out relevant base maps. This seems like it should be the city's job, not ours.)

Looking at the urban residential map, people propose building in places that should be protected. I reiterate, there should be no new development inside the Paddy's Pond Ice Lake area, bounded by existing subdivisions, Alaska Highway, Ice lake Road, Hamilton Blvd Extension.

Fish Lake development is inside the McIntyre Creek wetlands, and overlapping Kwannlin Dun land.

Are you saying Chadburn Lake/Hidden Lake area should lose protection? Forget it!

I think it is important that we keep the referendum process until such time as we get real citizen participation and representation in city processes. Our city is too important to give control without some sort of check on the process. I can't believe that this was a "big" requested item that made it into the Café process. A bit more effort working with citizens and less focus on developers and your legal staff seems in order. There seems to be a concept that for a city to grow we must continue to develop the wilderness we are all so proud of.

Some seem to be in a panic for developing in new empty spaces. As a result, greenspaces are not being dealt with in a reasonable way. Our city should be planned in a way that has less chance of messing up. It's especially sad when you look at what is purported to be the 2009 OCP Vision "maintains and conserves wilderness spaces for future generations."

Think ahead. Each person can not always get a fresh new piece of empty pristine land. Development should not be "okay, that's full, where to next?" "There has to be room for everybody," the mayor noted, pointing to the growing population! Country residential for Robert Service Way? I thought our land was valuable. Land development near the downtown, no matter which side of the river should be high density.

As I pointed out in earlier submissions to this OCP process, people want respect for their opinions. They want to be heard. You have a difficult set of choices that could be community building exercise, not community disrupting.

Please reread my earlier submission for this process. There is a lot of carefully thought out material there. People should not have to make new submissions at each of your stages to be listened either. There should not be a sense of despair and frustration when dealing with an organization paid for by our taxes.

Finally, it's hard for people to comment much until we see the complete OCP document WITH real maps, and whatever the city staff decides they want to do.

Peter
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Peter Long
K-L Services - 8442 Yukon Ltd.
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