The committee updating the Islands Trust’s Policy Statement has landed on draft language surrounding its plan for better marine ecosystems protection, flexing a local government muscle that would prohibit moorage buoys in sensitive areas.
The Trust Programs Committee voted to add a new directive policy to the Marine Shoreland section of the draft Policy Statement at its meeting Thursday, May 29, prohibiting the moorage of vessels in “sensitive marine areas, including, but not limited to, eelgrass meadows, kelp forests, forage fish spawning areas, estuaries and mud flats.”
The specificity on those areas relates to mapping already completed by the Islands Trust; they are also listed elsewhere in the draft document, indicating they are among those the trustees are explicitly interested in protecting.
“Moorage,” rather than “anchorage,” is used intentionally, according to staff, noting that temporary anchorage traditionally lies within the federal government’s jurisdiction as a navigational issue. Meanwhile, local governments are allowed to zone the marine surface within their boundaries, with the authority to permit — or prohibit — moorage beyond a period of time that could reasonably be considered navigation-related.
“The purpose is to uphold our mandate of preserving and protecting — and this one is not about docks,” said Bowen Island Municipality trustee Sue Ellen Fast, addressing committee members. “It’s about these sensitive life forms and ecosystems.”
The new language is not entirely unexpected. This update to the Policy Statement — to revise the guiding document to address issues such as the climate crisis, growing housing needs and the Trust’s commitment to reconciliation with local First Nations — has been in planning since at least 2019. In 2021, trustees hit pause on the process after an agenda posted in advance of a meeting included a proposed draft that prompted backlash — and a petition over concerns the Islands Trust was moving forward without enough public input.
The outgoing Trust Council in 2022 passed several resolutions listing dozens of revisions and additions to the Policy Statement they felt their communities wanted to see. One of the additions specifically prescribed strengthened policy language around “preservation and protection of the coastal and marine environment” — a piece of environmental stewardship trustees and much of the public had seemingly found lacking — citing an intent to support First Nations’ food security in Indigenous harvesting areas.
Within each Local Trust Area, trustees are tasked with effecting the policy statement through their zoning, and their decisions are necessarily supported — or not — by maps. Senior policy advisor Jason Youmans reminded trustees how they used mapping at each island would still be each Local Trust Committee’s decision to make.
“The eelgrass mapping, for example, identifies both the healthy beds and the sort of sparse areas — which either were once a healthy bed, or could be again,” said Youmans. “I think it will come down to the Local Trust Committee — or the island municipality — on how it chooses to employ the data.”
The proliferation of mooring buoys has been front-of-mind for local and regional governments recently. In 2023, a Capital Regional District (CRD) review noted nearly 500 mooring buoys within the Gulf Islands, 144 of which were in Ganges Harbour — up from 60 counted there in 1996. The CRD has linked those buoys directly to the growing number of derelict vessels throughout the regional district, but the CRD board stopped short of funding a regional harbour service this year.
Additional directives added to the draft Policy Statement Thursday included a less prescriptive recommendation to minimize light pollution through the application of “dark sky” principles, and another that would limit the construction of new breakwater structures — the sort extending perpendicularly from the shoreline out into the water, staff clarified.