Call it a warm-up.
About a month before the Oct. 20 municipal elections, four of the region’s mayors got a chance Tuesday to campaign in front of a friendly audience as the Urban Development Institute hosted a panel discussion on the role development plays in the community.
With questions that touched on affordable housing, development approval processes, transportation, and voter apathy, the four incumbents — Langford Mayor Stew Young, Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins, Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen and Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell — gave the impression of being in mid-campaign-season form and drew little in the way of criticism from a packed house at the Union Club.
There were plenty of rolled eyes, however, as a clearly self-aware Jensen waded into the question of establishing secondary suites in Oak Bay.
“There’s another way we are very different from Langford; [Young] brings in secondary suites by just doing it in one day. Well, we’ve been just doing it for 10 years,” Jensen said.
He was referring to a drawn-out process that is only now at the stage of hiring a consultant to look at the issue and exploring the possible problems with allowing garden suites and other “gentle” densification measures.
“I am confident it will go through and it is a very good way to provide affordable housing,” Jensen said.
“There is a need for innovation and thought in terms of how we can gently densify Oak Bay while protecting our unique established neighbourhood. It does take a little longer to get things done in Oak Bay than it does in Langford.”
Given the housing crisis facing the region (the rental vacancy rate is below one per cent) affordable housing was top of mind, with each of the mayors being asked what they intended to do within the first 100 days after the election to streamline the approval process for non-market-price housing.
Atwell said Saanich is evolving and he hopes the next council pushes ahead with modernizing its systems — getting away from paper and the inevitable delay in getting things done.
Young said Langford didn’t need a consultant to tell it there was a looming housing crisis and that secondary suites just made sense. He said his municipality intends to maintain the open discourse it has with its developers that he believes streamlines the process.
Desjardins said Esquimalt is just now having to deal with the building boom that the rest of the region has been facing for years and the municipality is starting to get bogged down in development requests. “We are just now inundated and that takes the timelines we thought were effective and we are now overloaded,” she said.
Desjardins said they intend to improve as they work through the glut of permit applications, but she maintained that developers whose paperwork and details are in order and not out of the ordinary should be able to get through the process within six months.
Jensen said the first 100 days of a new council should be time to look at partnerships with housing agencies and developers to come together to create non-market-priced rental housing in Oak Bay.
