The Islands Trust’s Regional Planning Committee (RPC) endorsed a near-final draft of its new bylaw compliance and enforcement policy and best practices manual, tasking staff with harmonizing those documents, adding a few changes generated at the committee’s meeting Friday, May 9 and forwarding the whole package to the B.C. Office of the Ombudsperson for review.
After that, with the RPC’s final endorsement of any changes suggested by that agency, it heads to the Trust Council for approval, permanently changing bylaw enforcement within the Islands Trust. The land use authority tackled revamping the guiding documents in response to a series of public concerns that ramped up in 2023, ultimately resulting in the Ombudsperson’s office issuing a list of recommendations — and the RPC has painstakingly integrated those into both internal and public-facing documents, with the target of being “administratively fair, reasonable and transparent” with the aim of restoring public confidence.
Big changes include establishment of guiding principles, a “roles and responsibilities” section, and new clear, detailed policies for commencing and conducting investigations. Conduct during those investigations, a site inspection process and principles, and policies for when investigations are closed are also laid out.
A section to deal with “frivolous and vexatious” complaints will come as comfort to many islanders who have expressed they felt targeted by such campaigns, as well as to enforcement officers who had previously been bound to fully investigate complaints that might be obviously groundless.
The best practices manual is built to be reader-friendly, removing acronyms and revised for plain language. It includes a visual flowchart about the bylaw enforcement process, and a section on how to appeal decisions made by officers.
If Trust Council adopts the changes this summer, keen policy watchers might notice the near-absence of the word “violation” in both the policy and the best practices manual — and not by accident, according to trustees and staff.
“We can have better language,” said bylaw compliance and enforcement manager Warren Dingman. “We’re kind of stuck with using ‘bylaw violation notice’ for our tickets, but we should use ‘contravention’ as much as possible.”
Trust planning services director Stefan Cermak said he had been in regular contact with the Office of the Ombudsperson, which suggested to him a review could take place within weeks of getting the document to them, possibly placing revisions in front of the RPC in July.
“[The Ombudsperson’s Office] has been monitoring our progress through this, and is keenly interested,” Cermak told trustees. “They actually said that the work this committee is doing is now being modelled by other communities — so you’re leading the way for others to do better work.”