Bow Valley municipalities are looking at making changes, possibly sweeping changes, to their land use bylaws
Unfortunately, in Banff’s case, the Town’s planning team has been muzzled in respect to parting with their expertise. RMO has been told that we are not allowed to speak with them about the land use bylaw review and that everything must go through the mayor.
This is the group, including Manager of Planning and Development Randall McKay and project leader Darren Enns, who have worked on forming these proposals, based on public input, for council’s consideration.
We are not allowed to ask them their rationale behind proposals or options presented, nor seek their expert opinion on the many complicated aspects of this review.
This is unprecedented; not only for RMO reporters to be refused a request to sit down with the planners, but very rare in how other municipalities operate when dealing with the press.
Perhaps there is a feeling lines have been blurred between administration providing technical fact and expertise versus political comment. Perhaps the thought is it’s time for council to let the community know who’s boss.
But the job of these planners is to provide expert opinion and, based on their research, provide recommendations to council, who are the ultimate decision makers.
Rather than outright refusing to let us speak to McKay and Enns, we suggest a better approach would have been to allow us to sit down with the mayor and planning team together - to better allow us to do our job and present accurate and better information to you, the reader, and Banff’s taxpayers.
Mayor Karen Sorensen tells us: “As the mayor, because this is such an important process, I prefer to be the spokesperson at this time.
“We’ve heard from constituents that they want to hear from council on this important process and we’re encouraging our constituents to consider options and proposals presented.”
No one is disputing the fact the mayor should speak to this. In fact, the Outlook offered the mayor and council the opportunity a few weeks back.
For the most part, they all gave it a pass. We hope this time around elected officials take the opportunity to provide the public with just that – an opinion.
As for Canmore, this week its Land Use Bylaw saw the first of what may be several public hearings.
Were we really surprised that the major issue of the development industry, which we will remind readers are the primary users of such a document, is with the Sustainability Screening Report process? Nope.
Surprising is that wording is included that could be considered to go against recent regulation changes by the minister of municipal affairs. The industry is critical of this as some of it goes against certainty of use and the protection of property rights.
One presenter went so far as to say it opens the Town to legal challenge. Do we really want to go through having a major planning document for the community go nowhere again?
To that, add the fact there are changes to categories of permitted and discretionary uses made in relation to SSR requirements. All this is without the results of a council-mandated task force to look into the entire process.
And a final point on green roofs. We have to agree with criticisms that this is jumping on a “green” bandwagon without consideration of cost or practicality.
Perhaps councillors should take a look at the esthetics of existing green roofs in town to see if they want to require such an expense for all low sloped roofs in the community.
