A rift between Ucluelet’s municipal council and their staff has floated to the forefront as the town’s reputation among developers dwindles.
“The way we’re going about things is giving us a reputation that’s less than ideal. We have consultants telling developers not to touch Ucluelet. This is a fact and to me that’s a concern when we’re facing a housing crisis and we need to have all hands on deck to have that kind of reputation spreading,” said Coun. Ian Kennington during Oct. 29’s regular meeting. “It’s certainly not coming from council’s direction on housing. We’re pretty proactive on it and we’re doing everything we can. So, we have to root out the problem of what’s causing this.”
Kennington was speaking to a recommendation from district staff that would delegate a wide range of authorities to staff without needing council approval.
The district’s Manager of Corporate Services Joseph Rotenberg presented the new Delegation of Authority Bylaw and suggested it clarified roles and responsibilities and would speed up processes by authorizing staff to complete day to day duties.
“The general theory here is if a matter isn’t delegated to staff, then you need a council resolution to get it done unless it’s purely administrative in nature,” Rotenberg said. “We’ve drafted a bylaw that would put staff in the position that they have authority to take care of those matters on their own.”
The new bylaw includes 33 sections of staff authorities and council didn’t bat an eyelash to the vast majority of them, but expressed vehement opposition to section 20, which would give the district’s Director of Community Planning authority to negotiate, approve and execute all related agreements, including covenants, rights of way, and other documents.
Coun. Shawn Anderson said “99 per cent” of the new bylaw made sense in terms of streamlining processes and increasing efficiency, but objected to giving staff the power to put potential roadblocks in the way of developments without council’s approval.
“I’m trepidatious about this on the basis that we recently had a situation where we found a covenant was put on a piece of property and the covenant specifically said there can be no affordable housing until a trail is negotiated and we’d never heard of that. Council and mayor never heard of that,” he said
“It sounds somewhat ridiculous because it specified affordable housing…I’m cautious about this. You can have someone behind the scenes set up a covenant and, without a back-channel conversation with, say for example a developer, we may never know what happened.”
Coun. Ian Kennington agreed.
“I have similar concerns based on what I’ve heard from developers who’ve approached. They come to me and say ‘We talked to staff and they said you wouldn’t go for it, so we negotiated this covenant but now we can’t make this work,’” he said.
“When it doesn’t necessarily align with the strategic priorities of council and these covenants are being negotiated without our knowledge and executed without our knowledge when, in fact, they probably wouldn’t have been executed had we been involved. To me, that’s a concern for sure because it doesn’t seem to go in the direction that we’ve been asking to go.”
He suggested allowing staff to negotiate and execute covenants without council’s approval is too far to go considering the number of developments on the community’s docket.
“Until we figure out how we’re going to move forward with some of the big development projects that we have on the board, because I’d hate to lose them over something like a trail dedication having to happen before affordable housing is occupied,” he said.
Rosenberg acknowledged that the proposed bylaw was “broad” and added that changes could be made “if council is uncomfortable with staff having that sort of latitude.”
“The challenge there is a timing challenge. It means that the approval would go through and then there would be some consequential agreements to come out and those agreements would then have to come back to council for approval later in time. So, there’s that degree of streamlining,” he said.
Kennington reiterated that council has run into situations where developers were given hoops to jump through by staff without council’s knowledge in the past.
“It’s an undue burden, especially for affordable housing, because to undo those covenants is time consuming and expensive and that just gets tacked onto the price of the affordable housing…At a time when we’re supposed to be streamlining, to me it just looks like putting up roadblocks and not having an open discussion,” he said.
“It just sheds light on potentially a problem and when those covenants don’t align with council priorities then it’s really an issue because these are negotiations with people that are being executed that are not in line with the community or council’s expectations of where things should be going.”
Coun. Anderson agreed.
“If we have a multi-million dollar development that’s our best kick at the can for affordable housing and there’s things that are in the guise of streamlining, but in fact are kind of almost like systematic obstruction at that point. It’s tripping people up in being able to deliver that affordable housing if there’s things that are in the way,” he said.
Anderson then offered a delightfully absurd hypothetical scenario to reiterate his concern around staff putting unnecessary hurdles in front of housing developers.
“We may never know why something fails because a ridiculous covenant can be put in place and then we come back and find out later that something’s collapsed and it’s just because we wanted 100 monkeys,” he said.
“I’m not trying to be cantankerous here, but when we’re on the precipice of having a development that answers affordable housing, we have to acknowledge the fact that anything that bureaucratically gets in the way is adding to the cost of the individual person that buys one of those units or rents them…If there’s things that sort of get egregiously tacked on over time and stall it, those are the things that I’m concerned about.”
Lawrence responded that staff could hammer out an amended bylaw that would ensure no monkeys are demanded.
“We can relook at section 20 of the delegated authorities bylaw to make sure we reflect that clarity that staff doesn’t arbitrarily ask for 100 monkeys to be added to the development,” he said, adding amendments could also include ensuring council sees and approves of potential covenants.
“What we want to make sure of is that this reflects specifically council’s intent and where you’re comfortable, so we can bring this back as many times as we need to make this right.”
Kennington suggested clear language would help critics point their fingers in the right direction.
“At the end of the day, we’re trying to get to a place where we feel comfortable and that, when the community wants to point fingers at who’s at fault, it’s pointed in the right direction,” he said. “Not necessarily at staff or not necessarily at us, but there has been confusion in the past so I’d just like to clarify who has what roles and responsibilities.”
