West Vancouverites have elected Peter Lambur to be their newest member of council.
Unofficial results show Lambur won Saturday’s municipal byelection with 1,262 votes. His nearest competitors in the field of 12 candidates were Andy Krawczyk with 939 votes and David Ayriss with 662 votes.
Lambur said he felt good on Saturday afternoon after a five-week “kitchen table campaign” that featured a lot of main-streeting on Marine Drive, but still, the win came as a surprise to him
“I’d like to send a little shout-out to everybody who voted for me. I’m really very grateful for all of their votes,” he said.
The 65-year-old architect and urban planner said he is most excited to get down to work on West Vancouver’s new official community plan, a major planning process just now beginning, “to make sure it really reflects the community vision for West Vancouver,” he said.
“From my point of view, it was really a grassroots response to the issues that are facing our community around housing and density, and I’m very gratified that people have voted for me on those issues,” he said. “People want to see revitalization and so do I. People are prepared to see growth, and so am I. But people also want to protect the essential character of this community, and so do I.”
Lambur’s campaign message focused heavily on respect for neighbourhoods, meaning he’s not a fan of spot zoning or developments that are out of character with their surroundings.
“They’re outsized and don’t fit their neighbourhood and they get approved for a variety of different reasons,” he said. “It’s bad planning practice. It shouldn’t happen.”
That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be growth or density, Lambur clarified, rather that it should only happen in keeping with the OCP, as developed by the community.
“I want it to be a community based discussion and clearly density is a hot-button topic. People have their views. Always have. Always will,” he said. “There’s no doubt West Vancouver has to absorb more growth. It’s a matter of where and how and how much?”
Lambur applies a similar principle to the concept of so-called monster homes, which council will be addressing in more detail later this fall.
“The overall thing here has to do with context and the fit,” he said.
When it comes to the controversial interim tree cutting bylaw, Lambur said he believes it should require a municipal permit to cut down trees on private land.
“The exact content and how that works is going to be the topic of, I think, some very animated discussion over the next little while,” he said.
On the perennial traffic file, Lambur said he’s in favour of improved transit, some form of road pricing and incentivizing people out of single-occupancy vehicles.
Mayor Michael Smith welcomed Lambur to the council table.
“We’re looking forward to working with the newly elected councillor and moving forward on council priorities,” he said.
Lambur has met with senior district staff and his new council colleagues to get oriented, part of which Smith said, will be learning the tricky balance of weighing the results of public consultation.
“When he gets on the quote-unquote inside here, he might see that we really try as much as possible to get as much public feedback on issues as we possibly can,” he said. “What happens, of course, is people who don’t agree with the ultimate decision say ‘People weren’t consulted.’ It’s a tough one.”
The unofficial tally Tuesday showed 5,170 cast ballots in the byelection out of an approximate potential of 31,000 – about 16.6 per cent voter turnout overall. Official results will be posted on Wednesday.
Lambur will be sworn in and begin council business at the Dec. 5 meeting.
Council called the byelection following the death of former Coun. Michael Lewis in August.
Here are the unofficial results:
Peter Lambur – 1.262
Andy Krawczyk - 939
David Ayriss - 662
Joanna Baxter - 550
Tom Dodd - 544
Tara Haddad - 432
Carolanne Reynolds - 262
David A Jones - 183
Varnon Pahl - 175
Rosa Jafari - 73
Farzaneh Bamani - 72
Jon Johnson - 9
