SUBMITTED BY TRANSITION SALT SPRING
For those of you who want to make your voice heard in the upcoming revision of the Salt Spring Island Official Community Plan (OCP), it’s time to pick up a pen or hit the keyboard: Phase 1 of the engagement being done by our Local Trust Committee (LTC) ends this Friday, Oct. 24!
And if you’re not even sure what that means, you’re not alone! Many Salt Springers still aren’t sure what the OCP is, or why they should care. Others are skeptical that the LTC will listen to their input, and still others are convinced that the LTC will continue its inexplicable agenda to [insert your certainty here].
But of course, the LTC is just made of people, most of them exhausted by a workload that has completely outgrown its dated budget and infrastructure. And yet, they’re aware that the OCP — our collective vision for the future of our community — hasn’t been updated in 17 years, and they undertook to do a review knowing that, if tradition holds, they will take arrows from all sides.
Transition Salt Spring set out, a year ago, to try to change that tradition. We started something we called the Common Ground process, which the Driftwood has reported on periodically, to find what the areas of agreement are that we share, instead of focusing on the much smaller areas where we disagree. Hundreds of hours of one-to-one and group consultation led into the Common Ground Summit in April, which brought together a broad and diverse group of community representatives and organizations.
Legitimate concerns have been expressed about this approach. The principles of the Common Ground process led us to accesspry dwelling units (ADUs) and short-term rentals (STRs) because the community representatives in the group didn’t find common ground there. Many believe those issues are critical to the housing discussion, but we don’t consider their exclusion to be a flaw, because the Common Ground process was not created to take on divisive issues. It was created to build more trust within our community, and identify the low-hanging fruit that we could agree on and support — together.
The change has been noticed. Our MLA Rob Botterell sensed the new spirit of cooperation and collaboration that grew out of the Common Ground Summit, and wanted the new Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs, Christine Boyle, to experience it. At the end of her visit last week, she noted: “One of the first things I heard arriving here was a description of Salt Spring as an argument surrounded by water. I’d not heard that description before, and it wasn’t what I experienced. I was really grateful all day to see really solutions-oriented conversations and people listening to one another and finding a path forward.”
So we at Transition believe we have a new option in approaching this revision of our OCP and accompanying land use bylaws (LUBs). Instead of voicing 11,000 (or so) individual opinions, we can look at the work that’s already been done, and — if we like it — get behind the holistic package of proposals for the OCP revision that grew out of the Common Ground Summit, called the Consensus for the Future.
Is it everything everyone wants? By definition, no. But it aligns with the lenses through which the LTC is asking for input on housing — preparing for climate change, protecting whole ecosystems and respecting Indigenous rights — which we believe reflect values that are deeply held by our community. And in addition to that tasty low-hanging fruit, it also has some unexpected ideas that may surprise you.
So if you want to be part of a new way of working on Salt Spring, and help get us the affordable housing we need while protecting the environment we all love, dig into the Common Ground consensus at transitionsaltspring.com/ocp. By Friday!