Cumberland: Hometown Showdown
Cumberland resident Kate Greening stands on her front lawn next to a billboard-sized sign that reads, “OCP Not For Sale", an emblem to this hometown showdown.
“I was the first one to put up a sign like this. I wanted everyone to see it as they drove into town,” she explains as a trickle of traffic rolls past on Cumberland Road.
Cumberland was once a town with a plan worth the paper it was written on. At the time of its creation, Cumberland’s official community plan (OCP) was a model of participatory democracy, the result of hundreds of kitchen and town-hall meetings that enjoyed remarkable public involvement from this Vancouver Island town of around 2,800. When the process was complete and the OCP was adopted by village council in 2004, the consultants had produced an impressive document that specified where and how Cumberland would grow; what land would be zoned commercial, industrial and residential; and how the buildings would appear aesthetically – all in the interest of preserving the unique heritage feel of this old coal-mining town while diversifying its meager tax base. Sure, there was plenty of debate and some people only grudgingly accepted the outcome; however, it seemed the impossible had been achieved: a general consensus on managing growth and development.
It’s no laughing matter achieving consensus in a place like Cumberland, affectionately referred to as “Dodge.” Except for the main drag, Dunsmuir Avenue, gravel back lanes abut potholed streets without sidewalks, and laundry flutters on clotheslines in front of heritage homes in varying degrees of restoration or dilapidation. It’s a place founded on the fortunes of coal baron Lord Robert Dunsmuir back in 1888, and although the last mine shut four decades ago, a company-knows-best mentality still persists in some circles. It’s not uncommon for a third- or fourth-generation Cumberlander, whose father, uncles and grandfather worked in Dunsmuir’s mines, to half-jokingly refer to a 20-year resident as a “goddamn newcomer.”
Recently a youthful mix of artists, musicians and professionals have flocked to Cumberland from “the city” for the affordable housing and the intimate, authentic heritage feel of the village. The town has the kind of aesthetic charm over which planners lose sleep trying to conjure or contrive elsewhere. Getting these two solitudes – old mining families and newcomers – to sit down in a room, agree on the nature and form of development and hammer out an OCP was a major coup.
However, three years after the ink dried on this weighty tome and one municipal election later, Kate Greening and scores of other citizens belonging to the Cumberland Residents’ Association will tell you the plan has the punch of a librarian. Where did this marvel of democracy go off the rails? Some blame their own council and the arrival of Trilogy Properties Corp., the renowned Vancouver-based developer behind the chic Opus Hotel in Yaletown and the award-winning University Marketplace at UBC.
Founded in 1990 by former Intrawest developer John Evans, Trilogy has since left its mark on the cityscapes of Vancouver and Whistler. In 2005, after property prices had spiked considerably in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley, Evans cast his gaze toward cash-poor but land-rich Cumberland – specifically at a massive 309-hectare chunk of land within village boundaries surrounding the strategic Cumberland exit from the Inland Island Highway.
It’s no surprise that Trilogy saw gold. From the ancient Roman Empire to the modern-day Fraser Valley, highway crossroads have always been nodes of commerce. That’s why, back in the mid-1990s when the asphalt was being laid for this four-lane expressway, Cumberland’s astute political minders refused to join other Island communities in signing an MOU prohibiting development at highway interchanges.
In 2002 Cumberland cemented its designs on this coveted chunk of turf when it annexed the land as part of a village expansion that tripled its land base. In 2005 Trilogy took out an option to buy the property, the company’s first play on Vancouver Island. Why? It’s simple, says Evans: “The Comox Valley is the most amenity-rich place in British Columbia right now.”
The attentions of a respected Vancouver development firm immediately caused a buzz in Cumberland pubs and coffee shops. However, it soon became clear that something was amiss. The problem for some locals was that Trilogy’s emerging vision for the property barely resembled the vision Cumberland citizens had spent six months and thousands of volunteer hours forging into a road map for future development. Trilogy would soon ask for major amendments to the OCP to allow for residential housing on land zoned as commercial or working forest. Last February Trilogy had its wish granted by council, in spite of an obstreperous public hearing on October 28 of last year, during which 91 per cent of the speakers, 781 signatures on a petition and 195 letters objected to the OCP amendment.
So much for grassroots democracy. For many locals who poured heart and soul into the OCP, it has become exactly what they feared – not worth the paper it’s written on.
There’s nothing illegal or even untoward about what Trilogy is asking for; OCPs are amended and changed as casually as people change shirts. Trilogy says it needs to sell house lots along with commercial space to pay for up-front servicing costs, whereas the vision laid out by citizens in the OCP explicitly targeted the interchange for commercial and retail, while directing residential development toward the existing village core. That way, Cumberland’s central historical core would be maintained, the tax base would be boosted by lucrative commercial ratepayers situated at the strategic highway intersection and Cumberland wouldn’t be saddled in the future with suburban sprawl that eventually becomes a municipal tax burden when infrastructure needs to be upgraded.
Now the homemade signs have gone up on the front porches and lawns of Cumberland: “Impeach Cumberland Council,” and “OCP Not For Sale.” Citizens who either took part in creating the OCP or supported the final result are crying foul, saying the spirit of public participation and democracy has been compromised, and accusing village council of folding like a pup tent to the whims of a flashy big-city developer.
To the outside observer, however, Cumberland’s is a story of what happens when lofty dreams of public participation in civic planning get dashed upon the cold, hard pragmatic realities of town politics and urban development.
To understand this all-too-familiar battle between small-town citizens and a savvy developer, it’s best to pop the cork on the politics that brought Cumberland to this crossroads. A good place to start is with planning consultant Dale Bishop, who can only shake his head when he looks at what has become of the OCP he was hired to help create.
“I saw an opportunity to do an OCP the way it was meant to be, with a large amount of public participation. The scale of Cumberland presented a unique opportunity for a planning approach that we had talked about for years,” says the former Vancouverite.
Ever since his idealistic days as a student at the University of Michigan back in the 1960s, Bishop had dreamed about a planning exercise that would be guided by the people and for the people, a process in which planners would play the role of facilitators instead of ivory-tower professionals dispensing wisdom to the citizenry.
Cumberland was an ideal place to put his vision into practice. Not only was the village manageably small in population, but voters had just recently elected a council that was all female, except for mayor Fred Bates, and particularly progressive and green-minded.
Bishop and his colleague Lou Varela scored the planning contract and got started in 2003. Counterintuitively, for the first six months they did no actual planning. Instead they facilitated the formation of three task forces to deal with economic, social and environmental issues. “We wanted to first build a common knowledge base about the community,” Bishop explains.
Rather than use the dry jargon of academic planning, the “knowledge” would be documented in the folksy language of locals. For example, volunteers sitting on the economics task force wanted to find out where the money came from in town, how much the village collected in taxes and where it was spent. So they sent a questionnaire around to residences, local businesses and the village office entitled “Where’s the money, honey?”
When the task force published the results of its work, it was written in equally homespun vernacular. For example: “In 2002 the Village’s take-home pay was just over $1.7 million and, just like home, we spent it,” it states.
“We had 45 very intelligent people sitting on these task forces. People were reluctant about the process at first, but, when they realized that we weren’t trying to use anybody, they got excited about it. They took ownership of the process,” Bishop says.
After the task forces published their respective tabloids, the community engaged in what Bishop calls “a conversation about character.” During 55 kitchen meetings, attended by anywhere from four to a dozen people and including everyone from third-generation Cumberlanders to so-called “newcomers,” citizens discussed form and function. From these casual, informal and potentially divisive meetings, citizens started to distill consensus.
For example, someone would say, “I don’t want another Nanaimo out there at the interchange.” After further discussion, it would emerge that what the person actually objected to was not so much the concentration of auto dealerships and large retailers but rather their appearance – the kilometre after square kilometre of asphalt and generic construction with little or no green space.
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