Thursday, May 14, 2009

Metro Vancouver Workshops

Metro Vancouver is in the process of hosting a series of 20 public workshops over the next little while to get community feedback on the new 2040 Regional Plan. The results of these workshops will be presented to the Metro Vancouver board in the fall. I’ve posted about this plan in the past and the green zone, so my comments can be found there. One of the major chances compared to the previous regional plan (LRSP) is the introduction of an urban growth boundary, defining an industrial land reserve, and finding different ways to protect natural areas from development in our region. I hope one of the end results will be less reliance on the ALR as a defacto urban growth boundary. I had the chance to attend one of these workshops last night at the Douglas Park Rec. Centre in the City of Langley. We heard presentations about the key areas that the regional plan tries to address: Create a Compact Urban Area, Support a Sustainable Economy, Protect the Region’s Natural Assets, Development Complete and Resilient Communities, and Support Sustainable Transportation Choices. We had to talk about how well we thought the plan addressed these goals, provide our feedback, vote on how we felt.




The LRSP had very little teeth and that can be seen in the fact the region’s plan of keeping office jobs in town centre and transit corridors (like Langley City and 200th Street) was not met. We had the option to vote on how much teeth we thought the new plan should have. The results are in the following picture.

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