I was in attendance and spoke last night at the public hearing on the new Official Community Plan, and I was in good company. By my unofficial count, over 160 people attended and about two dozen spoke (of which 3 spoke in favour of the OCP, one made comments that were not clearly in favour or opposed, and all the rest of which spoke in opposition to the OCP). People were given latitude in how long they were given to speak, which was a positive as some people had some longer, and some fairly technical, comments on the Official Community Plan. The strong attendance, one of the strongest I’ve ever seen at a Langford Council Meeting, shows that the community cares about this issue, and that’s a very good thing. Not only was the crowd standing-room-only, but it was spilling out into the hallway outside Council Chambers.

There were positives, but there were also concerns. It’s important to understand that a public hearing is meant to be a quasi-judicial process, and is therefore supposed to have a courtroom-like atmosphere. The Chair and the rest of Council are supposed to listen quietly, the Chair is to maintain decorum, and debating each other’s opinions is not allowed to make sure that members of the public aren’t intimidated from speaking for fear of others questioning or attacking their views. Last night I witnessed:

- while members of the public were reasonably easy to hear, the sound system did not appear to be working properly for the Chair and the others at the head of the room;

- cross-talk between the Chair and another Councilor and staff while the public was making submissions;

- the Chair appeared to, on a few occasions, debate and challenge speakers, and at one point specifically discouraged a member of the public from making a comments using a past-tense example to support his point;

- I counted 10 people in the hallway because of the overflow capacity of the room, opening the question whether those interested citizens could meaningfully participate in the process;

- while they were rare, there were a few catcalls from the audience that the Chair made no apparent attempt to rein in, and clapping was frequent and not reined in; these things aren’t allowed at a quasi-judicial public hearing like last night which is supposed to have court-room like sombreness to it (catcalls and cheers, depending on which side of an issue you are on, can certainly intimidate you from getting up to the podium, and one member of the audience shared with me afterward that he had in fact felt intimidated from speaking because of these issues).

While I was concerned about a number of these points, and it did raise questions about whether the proceedings should have gone ahead or whether they should have been put off to a larger venue to make sure everyone could participate and whether decorum should have been managed a bit more closely, things were at least being handled evenly. There was en even bigger concern that came near the end of the public hearing, though.

At a public hearing, the job of the politicians is to sit quietly and listen to the public. Deputy Mayor Denise Blackwell, who chaired the affair in the stead of an absent Mayor Young and two absent Councilors, reminded everyone at the beginning that the public hearing is, as the name suggests, a time for the politicians to hear the public, and that people weren’t to debate each other’s opinions. Unfortunately, she appeared to enforce this rule unevenly during the course of the evening. A Rainville Road resident (who was opposed to the Official Community Plan) made reference to the comments of another Rainville Road resident and was quickly and appropriately censured by Blackwell and asked to stick to his own thoughts and not comment on his neighbour’s. Yet, Ms. Blackwell said nothing when an speaker (in support of the proposed OCP) openly debated the comments that had been made previously in the evening by several other people. This speaker had even announced his intention to speak to points others had made when he first went up to the podium. I sat in the audience, incredulous, as he not only debated people’s points but referenced me by name when debating the points I had raised.

After he referenced me by name for the third time, I stood up and attempted to raise a point of order but Ms. Blackwell refused to hear it citing Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to post a clarification of a previous article on Inside Langford. Earlier this month I ran an article entitled Don’t go on summer vacation… that had as its theme that the OCP proposes a reduction in public notification of changes to the community.

I’ve had a discussion with City of Langford Planner Matthew Baldwin about this post, and he has provided some idea on how long it would take for this to all come to pass. As I mentioned in the original article, this reduced level of public notification would only come to pass if the OCP is passed (on which the final opportunity for public comment is now expected tonight at 7 PM, 3rd floor, Langford City Hall) and once zoning and other land-use bylaws are subsequently brought in line with the new OCP.

Matthew Baldwin makes the good point that “Implementation of all that the draft OCP envisions would require countless public processes, many of which would likely be quite extensive.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday night’s Council meeting at 7 PM in Langford Council Chamber’s has a 448 page agenda, a daunting task for even the most dedicated person to get through. I took notes as I went through the agenda about what was where, and I provide it here for anyone who wants to get an idea of what’s in it to assist people in finding the content that interests them. Think of it as a table of contents, based on the pages of the PDF (available here)

- Cheryl McLachlan -

Agenda Reading Guide

p. 1-2 – Agenda

p. 3-29 Bylaw 1157 (2710 Peatt Rd)

p. 30-33 letters against 2710 Peatt

p. 34 public hearing notice 1200 & 1201

p. 35-40 Staff Report to Council re: options by 1200

p. 41-46 attached maps (still with errors identified on p. 157?) Read the rest of this entry »

Recent agendas for Langford Council meetings have been as large as 967 pages, and that was creating a problem for people with older computers and slower connection speeds. Langford staff member Lindy Kaercher, after concerns were expressed by Langford Coalition members about this, came up with the idea of splitting the large agendas into multiple parts and offering it as one file or as a group of five files for those who need it in a smaller format. This is a welcome change, and credit to Ms. Kaercher for the idea.

Unfortunately, as of this morning, the City of Langford’s site appears to be down. With this Tuesday’s Council Meeting (3rd foor, City Hall, 7 PM, May 20th) having the public hearing on the proposed Official Community Plan (OCP), it’s very important that people be able to access the 448 page agenda for this meeting. Inside Langford is providing alternate hosting for the agenda for this forthcoming meeting, for anyone having trouble accessing the agenda. At present, the complete 448 page version is available at the following link (Langford’s website being down means we cannot access the 5-part version right now), and please be patient for it to load as it’s a very large file:

08-05-20_council_meeting_agenda

- Steven Hurdle -

The proposed Official Community Plan is a big document to go through, and new elements within it keep cropping up. Below are a few that don’t quite seem to jibe with each other:

- The OCP purports to support sustainability on the one hand (Page 12.1), and a huge increase in growth on the other (Page 35).

- While the document argues that City Hall should “Consider view impacts from the valley or from water bodies and from hillside development sites,” (p.35, Objective 3.12) but it also says that “Higher building forms, such as point towers, will be permitted,” on hillsides and shorelines in some circumstances (p.36, Objective 3.13.2).

-The new OCP advocates for more walkable communities, but it permits extensive hillside development with “Single-loaded travel lanes or one-way streets”, “Narrow and/or steep local roads”, “Very steep driveways”, and “Sloping boulevards with fewer sidewalks” (p.37, Objective 3.14.1). Read the rest of this entry »

In the lead-up to the first public hearing two weeks ago, one of the concerns expressed in an Inside Langford editorial was that the City of Langford had only done one of the two legally required newspaper ads, and that the ad was in the classified ads. To its credit, City Hall has responded to these concerns and not only published the required number of ads, but made them quite a bit bigger and put them in the news section where they may be seen by more people. Thank you to City Hall staff for this, the OCP is an extremely important document that’s proposed to guide the growth of our city for decades to come and a good turnout to Tuesday night’s public hearing (third floor, City Hall, May 20th at 7 PM) is therefore extremely important.

- Steven Hurdle -

There’s an interesting debate going on. Up until now it’s simply been understood that the new Official Community Plan (OCP) would define all of Langford as mixed-use (perhaps only the ALR land excluded from that, because provincial regulations insist on it). At a Planning and Zoning Committee meeting recently when the issue came up, it was clearly stated that all of Langford would be mixed-use, though the encouraged types of mixed-use would be different in some places than others. In fact, and this is a matter of record, page 35 of the Draft OCP Presentation from the March 8th Open House stated “Big Moves – Everything is Mixed-Use.”

Recently the chorus has changed. When a resident at the last regular Council Meeting argued that the OCP proposes to make everything mixed use, that was disputed by one of the Councillors. Yesterday, developer Jim Hartshorne added his voice to this new theme, and had a letter printed in the Goldstream Gazette (not yet on their website) where he also argues that not everything is going to be mixed use. In neither case was a section of a document cited in support of their claims that not everythng will be mixed use.

That begs the question, was the original claim wrong? Or is this an argument of semantics, where almost everything (but not quite every square metre) will be mixed use.

When one goes to the source, the OCP itself, one finds it has this to say Read the rest of this entry »

The 1.05% reduction in property tax rates for the coming year for Langford residents, passed Monday night at a Special Meeting of Council, is quite an achievement. It will be interesting to see how long it can be maintained, as there are up-front benefits to taxpayers when development ramps up but there are longer-term costs to consider. As your population increases you start seeing per-capita costs in cost-sharing formulas go up (we recently saw a huge increase in Langford’s share of the Greater Victoria Public Library costs as just one example, as the final 2006 census data recently forced recalculation of GVPL the cost-sharing). Nonetheless, credit where credit is due and let’s enjoy it while we can.

- Steven Hurdle -

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Langford lowering taxes
By Edward Hill – Goldstream News Gazette – May 09, 2008

Langford taxpayers will have slightly less pain in their pocketbooks this year with a 1.05 per cent cut in property taxes.

The cut means about $9 in savings on the average property assessment Read the rest of this entry »

Emergency Social Services (ESS) are services provided when the unexpected strikes. It covers disasters of all types, and while they’re typically natural disasters they aren’t exclusively so.

I first joined Langford’s Emergency Social Services team briefly in early 1997. The “Blizzard of ’96″ was a wake-up call that I heeded. For a few days I shoveled snow off of the roofs of trailer parks and farmhouses around Langford (mostly Hidden Valley), and I think it took more effort walking around in the snow to the locations than to actually do the shoveling. But, because of work commitments, my commute into town and back, and all the other things in life I unfortunately slipped away from ESS.

In recent years I’ve taken a job where I now live and work in Langford and that has reduced my commute and correspondingly increased the amount of time I have to be involved in my community, and one of the things I’m doing with that time is volunteering and taking courses with Langford’s ESS team. I’d encourage anyone who can make one meeting a month (on a Monday night), can take a weekend course once or twice a year, and wants to either help others or at least learn more about how they can help themselves in an emergency, to get involved with ESS. Emergency Social Services volunteers are the ones who spring into action when disaster strikes, helping their community (or people in a neighbouring community). Langford ESS volunteers have in recent years been involved in disasters as far away as wildfires in the interior of the province.

From when I first joined in 1997 to when I rejoined a decade later in 2007, Langford’s ESS team has grown in both size and experience, and is now arguably the most organised and one of the most well-respected across the region. Read the rest of this entry »

Council has recently been looking at a bylaw to allow electronic signs (up until now, lit electronic signs have not been allowed). Part of the discussion has been whether they should be allowed to blink or scroll, and whether they should be allowed in the downtown core.

There’s a business at the corner of Treanor and Millstream that has an electronic sign with a scrolling message, despite the fact that the bylaw to allow them hasn’t been passed yet. I find this peculiar, especially since bylaw officers have sometimes reacted strongly to sign infractions in the past.

- Steven Hurdle -