Dear Editor:
Last Monday evening’s council meeting was supposed to include a Public Hearing on the third reading of Bylaw 2014-002 OCP Urban Growth Strategy.
If you are like most of us you have never even heard about this.
I managed to find a small notice to two weekly Reviews.
It is only because I am on the Advisory Planning Committee that I was even aware we were doing another planning exercise.
Apparently three or four of us must have heard about it and filed submissions and just hours before the hearing, it was suddenly canceled.
I have to wonder if our concerns had something to do with the cancellation.
Or did someone actually realize this is not the way things are done.
My suggestion to our new mayor and council is “just forget about this planning business for a few years. We are officially planned out.”
This does not mean though, we are going to just sit back and allow a three-person select committee determine our future.
I don’t understand how these three people thought they could, in a few months, accomplish what the entire community failed to do last year.
The mandate you received was clearly to remove the Agricultural Land Commission from the process; it was not to arbitrarily tell us how our community should look in 10 years.
Now that the Agricultural Land Commissioners have been taken out of the process, it is very likely any new initiatives will be very similar to our 1995 OCP that has formed the basis for every revision for the last 20 years.
Remember, that’s back when new people actually wanted to move here and without a sewer system in the community, we had to include outlying areas like Prairie Valley and Deer Ridge.
I would say there is no rush to reopen the planning process.
Maybe after a few years of successful governing we could have another go at it.
Don Hudgeon
Summerland
