Chase Village Council deferred a decision to spend $60,000 on a consultant to help develop a new Official Community Plan.

CAO Joni Heinrich says there was some concern around the council table over the proposed price tag. “We need to sort of step back, sit down with our council and perhaps engage some of the community members to understand the reason why we need to go forward with engaging the community to develop a new plan. So, there’s probably no way we could do it for less than 60 thousand dollars. That’s a fairly tight budget as it is.”

 

She adds that is about time the plan be revisited. “Official Community Plan is about 17 years old and the community charter, which is a legislation that governs local government activities in BC, tells us that we should be reviewing that at least every 10 years.”

Heinrich says cost seemed to be the biggest concern with some feeling the current plan doesn’t need much updating and that new plan wouldn’t provide much new direction. But, Heinrich had a bit of a different message. “There are a lot of things that are missing from our OCP. There are a lot of things like… climate action initiatives are not included and they’re supposed to be included. We don’t have any development permit area guidelines.”

Chase council did approve spending up to $450,000 on a new fire truck with up to $200,000 coming out of reserves. It was also set to discuss whether to install a rainbow crosswalk in the community. The item was brought forward by Councillor Ali Maki who was unable to attend Tuesday’s meeting so the item was pushed off to a future date.