Hundreds turn out to help create vision for city’s future
Hundreds of Penticton residents expressed their hopes for the future of the community at a four-day engagement session put on by the municipal government.
City staff say around 120 people attended each of the four days of ExpOCP, which ended Saturday at a pop-up location on Westminster Avenue.
Information about the city and the upcoming challenges facing Penticton covered nearly every inch of the walls at the location, with activities set up to engage citizens in the future of their city.
The opinions are being gathered to help shape the new Official Community Plan.
One of the activities included a growth model for Penticton over the next 30 years, with attendees challenged to place the roughly 4,000 expected new houses on a base map of the city, following the real-life constraints like agricultural land and environmentally sensitive areas.
"It's understanding those trade-offs and doing different things," said Ben Johnson, the city’s special projects manager in charge of the OCP update.
"Like different ways of growing. The effect that growing in certain places can have on transportation, for example, or how we create communities that get people walking more or have businesses close to home."
The new community plan is set to replace the 2002 edition. There have obviously been some changes to Penticton since then, including a change in attitude on growing the city into the hillsides.
"A lot of people aren't so keen on that anymore. They want to see more infill and apartment development," Johnson said.
Sorting the sheer amount of data collected is going to present a big task as engagement continues.
Each attendee was asked to fill out a "passport" gathering feedback on different topics.
“We're going to collate that, compile it, and then we're going to have a series of workshops into the different areas," Johnson said.
Upcoming workshops will bring the opinions from these sessions into the next stage, coming up with policies to include in the OCP.
"We're going to be focusing in detail on all the different subject areas and then coming back to the bigger public with those recommendations and say, 'Hey did we get this right? What do you think?' And at that point we'll probably start to see our future land-use plan emerging," Johnson said.
Long-time resident Tanya Luszcz visited ExpOCP on Saturday so she would have a say in the future of the community, which she hopes will include more bike lanes.
“I think it's nice to see bikes in Penticton. There are many times I would rather be on the sidewalk because I don't feel comfortable. So very excited to see the development of bike lanes," said Luszcz, who works as a biologist.
She also echoed Johnson’s sentiment about Penticton growing "up instead of out," when looking at environmental sustainability.
Colin Mathieson, who recently relocated from Kelowna, was impressed to see the sheer amount of information and discussion.
"A lot of effort went into presenting all the information and all the different aspects of what makes Penticton Penticton and the improvements that could be done in the future in terms of population growth," Mathieson said.
For more information on upcoming events related to the OCP, visit www.shapeyourcitypenticton.ca.
The OCP update, budgeted to cost $250,000, is scheduled to be complete by fall and guide the community’s growth for decades to come.