It’s been long. It’s been arduous. It’s been divisive.
But the City of North Vancouver is well on its way to having a new official community plan following a public hearing and majority vote on Tuesday night.
With roughly 4,600 participants and almost 100 meetings, it’s staggering to think of the number of staff, council and volunteer hours that went into the shaping of this.
Big kudos are owed to everyone who contributed along the way.
Perhaps most impressive was staff and the residents of Moodyville working together to find a compromise that would restore peace to the neighbourhood.
Council members deliberately monkeyed with the OCP’s timeline last year, ensuring it became an election issue and thus ruining any chance of cooler heads prevailing. No doubt, that’s why the plan went down to defeat at its first public hearing last September.
Ultimately, it was the voters who installed the new council that broke the deadlock.
But even the council members who voted Nay on Tuesday night deserve thanks. The plan might not be the one they would have liked but it was surely shaped by their influence and North Vancouver is better served for it.
Not everyone will like the plan. Ask anyone sitting in traffic what they think about a future with more growth and you’ll get an earful. But growth is coming, whether we like it or not. Populations go up thanks to immigration and, well, natural biological processes.
It’s a prudent council that acknowledges this and plans accordingly.
