Lake Cowichan town council was told to keep their eyes on the prize when talking about the Cowichan 2050 strategy.
It’s important to keep local issues and finances on the front burner and not be caught up in the excitement of new region-wide ideas, planner James Van Hemert said at the May 8 council meeting.
“It [the plan] has been under construction for several months and speaks to a very wide collection of topics. The idea is that it will provide a platform that all the local govenments, elected officials, and CAOs would agree on as a path to the future on topics such as water supply, water use, clean air, even land use, and transportation,” he said.
“There are some issues that we can’t really solve alone,” Van Hemert said. “I don’t know if anybody’s driven the Trans-Canada Highway on Friday afternoons in Duncan, for example. Ultimately this would ensure that together, the entire Cowichan region, [finds] a way to work together in a more robust fashion than what has happened up to this point.”
So far, there hasn’t been a unifying document that everyone can point to as paving a path to the future, both in projects and agreements among governments, he said.
Van Hemert said it’s all too easy to get caught up in rhetoric.
“I’ve been to the meetings. I’ve participated on behalf of the town. I believe this must support local government action in a way that doesn’t cause undue burden on local government. I can generate a lot of enthusiasm about this. There are some cool, interesting ideas that are coming forward and a lot of people get excited about this.
“It’s easy to do that when you’ve gotten some really well-spoken CAOs and senior planners there, and they’re all excited about this, while singing ‘Kum Ba Yah’. But don’t be fooled,” Van Hemert cautioned. “[Those ideas] might come back to us and have financial implications. And I don’t think the policies and actions that come out of [discussions about Cowichan 2050] should duplicate things we’re already doing. It needs to be tightly focused.
“I’m quite frankly a little concerned that [the strategy’s document] is already 100 pages long. It’s a hefty read,” he said. Some CAOs have already expressed the need for a much shorter executive summary to present to citizens.
“We’re all in this together, and although we may not have a big population, we can contribute, but again we have to watch the bottom line that we are not impacted in Lake Cowichan. Because even though the CVRD might add a tax that we all have to pay, that’s still out of our citizens’ pocketbooks. We can think that there are a lot of great things in this strategy, but eventually it will come back to this table. I think it should have real results but unless it’s for a really compelling reason, we really have to watch the bottom line,” Van Hemert said.