February 24 Council Meeting: Safer side streets, Grade Crescent Heritage Road, and National Pharmacare

Yesterday, I posted about budget matters that were addressed at Monday night’s Langley City council meeting. Today, I will be posting about correspondence sent to council.

Recently council changed how we address correspondence. In the past, correspondence was included in the agenda, but unless someone on council explicitly stated that they wanted to address a particular matter from a piece of correspondence, the sender of the correspondence would not get a follow-up. Council will now follow-up on all correspondence that is included in the agenda to increase transparency.

Council received a letter from local resident Bruce Downing requesting that Grade Crescent be designated as a “Heritage Road.”

Grade Crescent was the alignment of the former Great Northern Railway which you can read about on the site “The Children of Fort Langley.”

Map of the former Great Northern Railway through Langley. Select map to enlarge.

Mr. Downing requested that the City consider applying for a grant from the BC Heritage Fund to install “interpretative signs at designated locations such as Conder Park, Sendal Gardens, Iris Moony which would inform passers-by of the history of that designated street which was the former rail network.”

Council asked staff to follow-up on Mr. Downing’s request.

The City of Port Moody sent a letter to all municipalities in BC requesting that their respective councils send letters to the federal government in support of immediately starting a Universal Public National Pharmacare program. Council asked staff to review this request from Port Moody.

On January 27th, Council received a letter from Saanich council. For close to 20 years, municipalities in BC have asked for the province to allow default 30km/h speed limits that could be applied to all side streets. This would support reducing the amount of people that die or are seriously injured in motor vehicle crashes. This is part of something called Visions Zero which you can read more about in previous posts.

The province once again stated that they would not be adding the option to allow municipalities to set default 30km/h speed limits.

Saanich council was disappointed to hear this, as was Langley City council. We sent a letter noting our disappointment to the Minister of Transportation & Infrastructure.

Council heard back from the Minister. She stated that the province is now working on pilot projects in partnership with local communities “to support active transportation and better protect vulnerable road users.”

She also stated that “a second phase of pilot projects could allow the ministry to work with interested municipalities to lower the default speed limit on their streets.”

Langley City council made the following motion on Monday:

THAT the Council for the City of Langley send correspondence to the Honourable Claire Trevana, MLA, Minister of Transportation & Infrastructure thanking her for the reply, and requesting that she inform City of Langley Council when the second phase of the pilot project to support active transportation and better protection of vulnerable road users will be open for submissions.

I look forward to hearing back from the Minister about the potential of working together to make our streets safer.