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LAUTENS: Narrative about West Van's Five Creeks project is amiss

The District of West Vancouver’s narrative about the Five Creeks stormwater project is: Not an item for a council decision. Just as when council doesn’t vote on routine bridge repairs or repaving a street.

The District of West Vancouver’s narrative about the Five Creeks stormwater project is: Not an item for a council decision. Just as when council doesn’t vote on routine bridge repairs or repaving a street.

So council was informed only in camera over the years – the first agreement was signed three years ago and was twice updated – about this big, intrusive project. You don’t need Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker and curved pipe, or Columbo’s raincoat, to conclude that town hall knew an angry public reaction to the project was sure to come down the pike.

The bureaucracy and the technocrats handled it. So there’s we-know-best high-handedness from town hall staff in scorning the project’s opponents to whom they told nothing: “We are aware of many false statements circulating in the community about this project,” the official story huffs. Also: “That the project is only being undertaken to support (British Pacific Properties’) development … is a gross misrepresentation.”

Including, no doubt, that it’s a gross misrepresentation that clearing water-retaining trees and other natural foliage and replacing them with concrete and fine homes could possibly influence stormwater flow-off.

So the numbingly legalistic 28-page contract, the Stormwater Diversion System Agreement (deserves capitals, I guess) was signed by Geoffrey Croll, president, and D. Joseph Pattern, vice-president, for British Pacific Properties, and Nina Leemhuis, chief administrative officer, for the DWV – not, note, by West Van mayor and chief executive officer Mary-Ann Booth.

Cue savewestvanscreeks.com, some of whose leading lights are battle-toughened veterans of the opposition to TransLink’s ill-begotten B-Line (Booth and Coun. Nora Gambioli have made it clear that town hall’s bloody-nosed retreat is just tactical, and the B-Line will go ahead in some form. Toldja so.)

Nigel Malkin is again rallying the troops, pressing the nature pedal: At the bottom of 31st Street, an achingly beautiful area that will be upheaved by construction of the pipe and stormwater outtake, he spotted “a pair of nesting eagles in a tree less than 100 metres from the blasting and tree-felling that would need to be done. This project must stop NOW.” His capitals, of course.

But the DWV isn’t playing footsie, perish the thought, with zillionaire BPP, 4,000 acres bought by the Guinness family in 1932, who also allow with classic British understatement that they own 300 stratospherically valuable acres of central London. No bias here. I adore Guinness stout.

Prominent B.C. blogger Rebecca Bollwitt wrote in 2015 that BPP’s charities include the West Vancouver Streamkeeper Society – now that’s a fine organization. The society supports the stormwater project.

Last Friday B.C. Supreme Court Justice Nathan Smith upheld the BPP-DWV injunction against several citizens endeavouring to physically stop pipeline construction of what’s known in short form as the Five Creeks project.

A colourful aside: Justice Smith was once Nate Smith, reporter for the Province newspaper, nephew of top Vancouver Sun reporter and columnist Simma Holt, and his mother Hannah was an expert in the serious Higher Astrology, once creating a long, learned profile of my deepest self, which I think she found shallow. Small world, no?

• • •

I love this town. Where else do you see this?

Two cars stop simultaneously at an intersection. One driver motions to the other: “Please, go ahead, Gaston, with my compliments.” Other waves back: “No, no, I insist – after you, Alphonse.” This politesse is so West Vancouver. And should three, four cars stop at a corner … night falls, cold dinners all around.  

rtlautens@gmail.com

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