Official community plans serving wrong people
Editor’s note: There’s always room for one more. Please welcome to the fold new guest columnist Brian Horejsi, who will be writing every other week on local issues.
There are people who take comfort when government claims to have a “plan” to manage either activities and proposals that might be beneficial to taxpayers and citizens or represent a serious threat either to our tax dollars or our right to participate in democratic process.
Threats most often extend to important social values like taxation, density and location of development, health care, and then public resources like public lands, parks, wildlife habitat, and critical necessities like forests and water.
A plan suggests resistance to exploitation of citizens, providing them a path to stability and greater well-being. Taxpayers expect, rightly so, to be a significant and influential part of any plan.
Brevity and clarity should be prominent in any plan, after all, what is there to hide? The essence, the “punch,” in a plan arises from what it says shall not be done; then it opens the door to citizens and developers to work with what’s available. But that’s not what we see.
Penticton, Summerland and Peachland have Official Community Plans that are contradictory and circuitous, rife with standard loophole terminology.
Penticton’s 230-page “condensed” city plan proposes solutions to virtually every conceivable developer’s problem, but provides no enforceable direction to accommodate the many serious problems facing Penticton citizens.
There are multiple references to “should,” “consider,” “encourage,” and “variances;” standard loophole escape language. An about-face is evident when it comes to approvals of (as opposed to applications for) development and commercial growth; the word “will” rears its head.
To understand the planning charades city administrators engage in, keep in mind the evolutionary forces behind OCPs.
Citizen distrust of senior public servants and suspicion of the special interest motives of city councils and mayors drove these latter parties to shield themselves behind an official plan.
The established keepers of government needed something to throw the dogs off the trail (that’s us, citizens), so to speak.
An OCP should be a document of protection and restraint, of democratic process, and of public participation and direction. It should not be a list of wide-eyed fantasy, of every developer’s wish list of ambitions.
That is not planning, it is not governing, nor is it in the public interest. OCP’s have degenerated into political cover that frees councils, mayors and city halls to “weasel in” every conceivable scam or scheme that comes up, ranging from millions of dollars squandered on revitalization catering to the private sector to five-storey buildings on precious waterfront space
Where has this kind of “planning” landed us? Offensively tall high-rises dominating the skyline and choking waterfront property. Block upon block of cookie cutter apartment buildings. A grossly overwhelmed transportation system. Recurring commercial threats to city parks. And on it goes. The brutal reality is local Official Community Plans have degenerated into a regulatory blank cheques for city councils, city administrations and the private sector opportunists that are constantly baying at our doors.
Dr. Brian L. Horejsi is a wildlife and forest ecologist. He writes about environmental affairs, public resource management and governance and their entrenched legal and social bias.