Entering the Royal Bay secondary commons area Saturday afternoon, one found a bouncy castle at one end and a stage full of musical equipment at the other.
While music and a kids fun area were family drawing cards for the City of Colwood’s Big Ideas Fair, it was the activities in the middle that were the real reasons city staff and council wanted residents to drop by.
Hundreds of ideas for amenities that people want to see in the city in future were stuck to one wall. On the opposite side of the room, a dozen or so jars representing priorities were being filled up with beads. And on the floor in the middle, children looked for and found their home in a giant-sized aerial photograph of Colwood.
The Big Ideas Fair was the last major component in the City’s public engagement strategy leading up to the creation of an official community plan update, which will likely come before council in draft form later this year. A big part of that public connection has been a web survey, which to date has surpassed 1,100 responses, said City planning director Iain Bourhill.
“We’re already crunching that data and we’ll be taking everything including the (input from) previous public events … where we’ve invited people to come and tell us what they think about the future of Colwood in specific key areas,” he said.
The suggestions on the idea board ranged from the simple – such things as improved lighting and sidewalks – to the grand: one person wrote that they’d like to see an amphitheatre next to a pier and boardwalk on the ocean, presumably below Royal Bay.
Colwood seems to have made a priority of hearing from its residents on the big-picture planning of its neighbourhoods, business districts and green spaces. Information gleaned from this event will be sifted through and blended with other input, then re-presented to the public, possibly this summer, and in the form of draft policies to make sure city staff heard people accurately. After that the draft OCP will be fine-tuned, aligned with updated land-use bylaws (zoning) and brought to council in November.
“Colwood’s at a critical time in its history, in terms of seeing a historical level of growth and development change,” Bourhill said. “Certainly with the development has come expectations of how the city will benefit from the development and harness the power of new development to improve the quality of life for the people of Colwood.”
He pointed to the Royal Bay project as a good example of a brownfield that is being transformed into a community amenity through co-operative planning.
A recent luncheon at which the City invited developers who had made project applications to the city in the last several years proved somewhat of an eye-opener.
“It was interesting to see how much of their input reflected what we’re hearing from the general community in terms of the opportunities that are out there,” Bourhill said.
Coun. Lilja Chong said the layout and atmosphere of Saturday’s event lent itself well to creativity.
“What I’ve noticed … is that people are getting comfortable with letting their ideas just roll out,” she said. “Someone might mention a pier on the water and someone else might say, ‘that’s a great idea, but you know what? A boat launch would go great with that.’ So it’s really awesome to see people’s idea come together and see their ideas build from one another.”
Much like what has driven planning for the City of Langford, requests for more sports and recreation facilities and opportunities have tended to dominate public engagement sessions in Colwood.
That theme continued Saturday, but what has surprised Chong is the lack of requests for more of an arts and cultural component to the City’s offerings. “However, what we have been finding (demand for) is outdoor concerts,” she said, noting that Eats and Beats at Esquimalt Lagoon, and the Rock the Shores festival have proven very popular.
“The public’s input’s really important to us,” Chong said in closing. “We’re trying to get input in all sorts of ways and really trying to catch it from all points of view.”
The online survey remains open for input. It can be accessed here: colwood.ca.
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