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Council and staff have recently
finished an all day retreat to talk about goals and objectives for both
the coming year as well as strategic long term planning. A wide range of
topics was discussed and it's only by sitting through all of the
discussion do you really start to appreciate all that goes on in and
around city hall. The first topic had to do with the Official Community
Plan. Our current citywide OCP is approximately 10 years old and is
seriously outdated, and even though we are going through an OCP update
for Arrow Heights as well as Mt Mackenzie, we need to update the OCP
citywide. We also talked about sustainable development and incorporating
this into our day to day operations at the city but also to apply
sustainable elements into new development. This will become a more
important facet of development and the sooner we implement this into the
daily business of running the city, the better off we will all be in the
long run. Incidentally, I know that the resort development is taking a
very serious look at a sustainable resort community.
One aspect of a community
facing any kind of growth is infrastructure needs. There is a huge
amount of planning that goes into forecasting infrastructure needs and
having an updated OCP helps us plan not only the direction of future
growth but the water and sewer lines needed to accommodate that growth.
The next 20 years of development could see this city requiring upwards
of 20 million dollars of new infrastructure. This can only get paid for
through Development cost charges (DCC's), taxation, and hopefully grants
from other levels of government. You will be hearing a lot more over the
next few years on infrastructure needs and our ability to pay for them.
A minor crisis for this
community is in attracting people to move here for both work and play.
The resort will attract a lot of people that will want to move here and
this in itself will put more pressure on housing and increased prices.
The affordable housing strategy is offering some solutions, but as a
community we have to be proactive and come up with ways to keep our town
affordable. This is only a snapshot of topics discussed at the retreat
but I will try to keep the community informed on more of these items in
the near future.
The last Council meeting
saw a contingent from the Revelstoke Ambassador program in attendance. A
couple of the Ambassadors gave a brief presentation to Council. I would
like to thank them for coming to the meeting, as well as acknowledge all
of the work that they do around the community and the promotion of
Revelstoke when they are visiting other cities. It is worthwhile
mentioning and thanking the volunteer committee that works hard to keep
this program alive and strong.
Mark McKee
Mayor
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