An effort to make the Islands Trust’s bylaw enforcement process clearer and more open has hit some snags, as trustees grapple with the complexity of the process –– and with balancing provincial requirements, such as that dispute hearings be held in public, with the best interests of leery islanders.
The land use authority is reviewing how it handles bylaw enforcement, with the goal of “restoring public confidence” in response to a series of well-aired public concerns that ramped up in 2023, ultimately resulting in the B.C. Ombudsperson’s Office issuing a list of recommendations to the Islands Trust last fall.
One of those recommendations surrounded transparency, suggesting the Islands Trust have an enforcement policy that the public could easily understand. To that end, on Friday, Nov. 8 the Regional Planning Committee (RPC) received a first draft of a new “plain language” best practices manual –– highlighted by a friendly visual flowchart.
That draft graphic –– the “bylaw enforcement pathway,” bylaw compliance and enforcement manager Warren Dingman said –– is a first step in a broader attempt to make current policy a little more user-friendly.
“To take out the acronyms,” Dingman said, “take out the ‘inside baseball’ terms that the general public is not going to understand.”
Policies and procedures currently available were really created for staff to use internally, he explained; producing the forward-facing public document was proposed by the RPC and endorsed by the broader Trust Council, and trustees were largely quite happy with the draft. Denman Island trustee David Graham said that while there would likely be necessary “tweaks” before a final version, it was a great start.
“I think our public will really appreciate how clear this is,” he said. “And they’ll really start to understand how bylaw enforcement works.”
Committee members related stories of being approached by worried islanders who were either concerned they might be out of compliance on their property, or knew they were and wanted to figure out what to do about it. Local trustees felt it was important to put themselves into that new public-facing document, and officially into the “flow” for their residents.
“As a trustee, I would hope that we would be able to be one of their first steps in determining how to come into compliance,” said Denman trustee Sam Borthwick. “I want to help them get through that process in a way that’s helpful and good, and does not feel scary; there’s a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety around that for some people.”
And planning services director Stefan Cermak suggested that could even be extended to planners.
“I’m a community member on Salt Spring, and I’ve been with the planning department for quite some time now,” said Cermak. “A lot of questions I get are, ‘Hey, I have this illegal thing, what do I do?’”
Cermak said just like trustees, planners don’t feel like they’re out there looking for things to enforce against –– but agreed that sometimes inquiries are vague, with islanders fearing the worst.
“Some people are quite cagey, because they’re like, ‘I won’t tell you where I am because therefore, you’re going to enforce,’” he said. “But that’s never been the case that I’m aware of. We’re here to help them get where they need to go –– and perhaps that’s a cultural thing that we need to be better at sharing.”
While a kinder, gentler bylaw process may be the goal, some of the procedures are set in provincial law, Dingman said. One that seemed to surprise trustees was a legal requirement that enforcement hearings be open to the public, per the Local Government Act. Notably, Dingman explained, there was no corresponding legal requirement for notice to the public.
“So the parties involved –– the bylaw officer, the respondent and complainant and of course the adjudicator –– are notified,” said Dingman. “There are sometimes community members who have concerns, and they contact me and they get a link [to a Zoom-facilitated hearing] and they can observe.”
Saturna Island trustee Mairead Boland suggested that relying on non-official channels might leave the public feeling excluded from the process.
“If I don’t know what I don’t know, I’m not going to find out,” said Boland. “Am I [as a member of the public] going to send you a letter every week asking if there’s a hearing?”
But trustees also worried about the consequences for more vulnerable islanders in publicly amplifying what could often feel like very private disputes.
“For someone who is really feeling that they’re being oppressed by the Local Trust Committee,” said Graham, “I don’t want to broadcast that.”
“We can’t go against what the law is, what the act says,” said Dingman, “that we have to make our boardroom here in Victoria open to the public, from whatever means.”
Boland suggested removing part of the draft language noting that members of the public could request hearing information, and leaving it vague. More broadly, Salt Spring trustee Laura Patrick worried too many unclear steps in what was meant to be a simplified version of the process risked alienating islanders –– and possibly was even premature, given bigger plans to revamp the process itself.
“The Ombudsperson report said our policy needed to be designed to speak to the public,” said Patrick. “Perhaps we’re jumping steps. We’re not going to issue a new manual publicly if we’re about to update the policy?”
Ultimately, the committee felt the topic needed its own meeting for more discussion and asked staff to schedule a special one just for the purpose of discussing both the manual and enforcement policies. Trustees plan to have that meeting in January, in time to put any changes into place before the RPC’s Feb. 7 meeting.
That timeline would likely put the policies before the Trust Council for consideration at that body’s meeting in March –– one year after the review process officially launched.