Metro Vancouver will meet Friday for its monthly board meeting, where the biggest item on the agenda will be whether to move ahead on a big budget change that would add more than $10,000 in new fees to the cost of all new housing units in the region.
We’ve
covered that debate in depth in recent weeks, which
you can read here, so we won’t rehash the pros and cons.
But they’ll also be asked to approve the latest updates from its Regional Parks Committee on the ongoing
Bowen park campground saga — where the $40-million project continues to move forward slower than a long weekend ferry lineup at Horseshoe Bay.
“No issue has united the citizens of Bowen as this proposal has for overnight camping,” said Julie Vik, a Bowen Island resident who spoke at last week’s meeting.
“Young, old, rich, poor, developers, conservationists, all walks lead to a tentless park.”
Sometimes such rhetoric by members of the public is over the top, and doesn’t actually represent public opinion.
However, park committee members were also given the results of public engagement done over the summer — and it shows a fairly big disconnect over Metro Vancouver’s plan.
More than 1,100 people took part in the engagement process, almost equally divided between Bowen islanders and the rest of the region. While 73 per cent of people off the island supported the draft vision for the park, that number dropped to 33 per cent on Bowen Island itself.
There are a multitude of concerns that residents, Bowen Island council and the Islands Trust want Metro Vancouver to address, but fundamentally it still revolves around overnight camping, particularly car-based camping.
Bowen Island Mayor Andrew Leonard said the lack of movement on that issue led to a further decline in trust.
“When I put myself in the mind of local residents, it has me wondering … they might feel they were engaged in more of a public engagement exercise,” Leonard said.
Last week, Bowen Island asked Metro Vancouver for modifications before they move forward on the rezoning process. Metro has shown no intention publicly of doing so.
Which means there’s a standoff that could be resolved in a number of ways: many people on Bowen would like Metro Vancouver to
sell the land at a $10-million loss to a local conservancy group, but Metro is within its rights to sell the land back to a private developer.
For the moment though, it’s a $40-million mystery — and a textbook example of how a failure to anticipate differences in local and regional priorities can cause plenty of headaches.
