THE City of North Vancouver has abandoned its plans for a public task force to study the future of Harbourside, as two more councillors changed their minds about how to address the sweeping development proposal.
The city's previous council unanimously endorsed the idea of a task force to study the wisdom of building up to 370,000 square feet of business space in the lots immediately south of the auto mall, as well as introducing up to 800 new homes into the undeveloped commercially zoned area.
After the November election, Mayor Darrell Mussatto and Coun. Craig Keating both had a change of heart, joining newly elected Coun. Linda Buchanan to argue for the issue to go directly to the public hearing required to change the official community plan. They were narrowly defeated on Jan. 23, when council voted to form a task force paid for by the developers and made up of local residents, city staff, business owners, various advisory panel members, a representative of the Squamish Nation and of the North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce.
The two main questions are the introduction of residences into a business and industrial area, and what civic amenities the city might ask for from the developers, Concert Properties and Knightsbridge Properties.
Monday night, Couns. Guy Heywood and Don Bell also reversed their positions. Heywood called for the task force to be scrapped and replaced by one public information session and a pair of town hall meetings, which could, he hoped, bring the OCP amendment to a public hearing before the summer break.
"I realized you can't have your cake and eat it too," said Heywood. "The issue that I would like the task force or some similar process to be involved in is how to make residential density work at Harbourside. The question of whether there ought to be residential density at Harbourside could take over the whole process and that debate is one I think belongs in a broader scope of consultation such as a town hall meeting."
"I spent the day out on Highway 1," he said, "in a couple of industrial parks in Abbotsford and Chilliwack and Langley. They can afford to have low-density industrial parks. Our Harbourside precinct is not like that. It can't reach its highest and best potential with a single level of density."
Bell, who also made an about-face on the task force, said the key issue for him was timing.
"I was advised that a task force could take four to six months," he said. "I indicated I felt this is something that needed to be dealt with before the summer break by this council. . . . This is a process that began in earnest about two years ago."
Based on a staff report, Bell pointed out that a task force process could push the public hearing into the fall and a final up-or-down vote near the end of the year.
The remaining proponents of the task force, Couns. Pam Bookham and Rod Clark, attempted to delay its cancellation until after the city had invited Seaspan Shipyards, which is immediately to the west of Harbourside, to describe the needs and impacts stemming from its large new long-term naval shipbuilding contract.
"I want to have Seaspan in front of us and ask them some specific questions about what their subcontractors may need in the way of space," said Clark. "I think that's a logical way to proceed. . . . Shipbuilding is a whole lot more than just welding steel together. It's about building systems. . . . A lot of that expertise comes from overseas, and they're going to need some space."
Clark said Heywood's process was "foolish" and "flies in the face of logic."
Bookham said she was disappointed by previous experiences with town hall meetings, particularly one held to discuss the controversial - and ultimately rejected - Site 8 tower proposal.
"It seemed to me, and to people there, like a deliberate strategy by the applicant to limit the kind of exchange that goes on," she said. Heywood's motion, she said "is really playing to the applicant's desire to get approval for residential use before the community has the opportunity to consider alternate uses. This is our very best opportunity to see these sites used for the purpose they were intended, which is commercial and industrial, not residential."
Such a course, Bookham said, would "commit ourselves forever to be a bedroom community."
Council voted 5-2 to scrap the task force and move ahead with Heywood's proposed meeting schedule.
Clark's invitation to Seaspan was approved in a later agenda item.
