While there aren’t any streets with no names in Lantzville, local politicians want to ensure future roads in the district have names that better reflect the community.
Lantzville councillors unanimously agreed on a motion calling for staff to create a street naming policy for the district during a regular council meeting on May 27. The motion was a modification from another motion that requested council have the ability to approve future names within the district.
Staff, as a result of council’s decision, will now be asked to bring forward a policy that provides developers and councillors with some guidelines on naming future streets within the district. The district does not currently have a street naming policy.
Coun. Ian Savage, who made the original motion, said with all the development slated to occur in Lantzville there will be new roads and council has an opportunity to decide what they will be named.
“It is important to create a road naming policy as soon as possible,” Savage said. “We can just let developers name the roads with … potentially little regard for Lantzville’s history or character or we can have a vibrant policy which allows us to honour people by naming a road in their memory.”
Such a policy would give Lantzville the ability to better market its assets through street names according to Savage, who suggested a handful of names including Food Market Lane, Trendsetting Street, Advanced Avenue, Technology Road, Green Space Way, Kayak Heaven Place, Beach Bliss Place and Hiking Gems Avenue.
“What we are doing is we are taking this as an opportunity to market Lantzville and it will be up to [council] to create names. We can also involve the public for submitting names and that is a good thing for bringing the community together,” he said.
Savage also said it is common for developers to name roads after their children which he felt was “kind of neat” but also “kind of comical.”
“I don’t know if we want to end up with a town where we’ve got Kaitlyn Way, Brody Place, Bryden Street, Larry Avenue, that sort of thing,” he said.
Coun. Will Geselbracht said he was on board with the idea and would like to see the policy allow for streets to be named in Hul’q’umi’num dialect, the Snaw-aw-as’ traditional language.
Lantzville Mayor Mark Swain suggested that it wasn’t a wise use of council’s time to be approving street names during meetings. He said whatever policy staff comes back with should focus more on themes for various neighbourhoods within the community rather than having council be responsible for naming every single new road.
“Maybe for the Ware Road subdivision there is a particular theme that you would like to see and council can have input into whatever that theme is rather than getting into the minutiae of choosing names,” he said. “We can just set a broader naming policy.”
Kyle Young, the district’s community planner and subdivision approving officer, said developers tend to suggest names for new roads during the subdivision phase of a development and the subdivision approving officer reserves the right to assign new road names.
“Council is not necessarily involved in that process but it is helpful to have a policy that provides guidance, so staff certainly agree with that,” he said.
Young also cautioned councillors that while staff are supportive of a policy, they don’t want to create an unrealistic expectation that new street names will be brought forward to council.
Meanwhile, Trudy Coates, the district’s director of corporate administration, suggested that it might be better if developers were required to choose from a list of names instead of having the ability to name streets to their liking.
In the end, councillors agreed to have staff draft a street naming policy, which council will eventually vote on. No timeline was provided.
nicholas.pescod@nanaimobulletin.com Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram
