Re: Mayor refused good options: Daly (Letters, Dec. 21)
Coun. Ted Daly’s latest justification of the graceless Dec. 5 coup to remove Mayor Finall from the CRD board remains unconvincing. Daly’s good options amounted to maneuvering the mayor (Daly seems to flip-flop on decisions when it’s convenient, Letters, Dec. 21) into choosing between outright removal from the CRD board and representing the district on the CRD board, year-by-year at the pleasure of Team North Saanich Plus One. A humiliating choice if you ask me. I was there.
In the same letter, Daly has correctly identified the restrictive Agricultural Land Commission covenant as a major flaw in the tentative “deal” regarding the Sandown race track property. The ALR initiative has been successful for the most part in restraining greenfield urban sprawl but has failed to encourage food production near urban centres due to its policy of including five-acre hobby farms as legitimate agricultural uses. If the Sandown proposal collapses, North Saanich will contain another cluster of imposing houses with horse paddocks – rural ambience to be sure, but only ambience.
I’ll put out my own pie-in-the-sky proposal for district-owned cluster housing with garden plots leased at reasonable rates, a site for a year-round farm market, maybe a simple community hall – in other words a mixed use that meets community needs and has community support while containing some agricultural components. The business plan for such uses should be revenue-neutral or close to it over the long term. I suggest that such not-for-profit ventures, initiated and managed by municipalities to meet defined and supported public objectives, would be a good use of some marginal agricultural land, a better use than hobby farms. I further suggest that the brainstorming and horse trading should be pushing in that direction.
Daly could make a significant contribution to our community if he were to direct his negotiating skills towards obtaining a workable agreement with the Agricultural Land Commission. We’re not talking about initiating a major project on the Sandown property tomorrow – we can take our time to get it right. But without obtaining some commitment to flexibility on the part of the Agricultural Land Commission and very soon, the resulting uncertainty could doom the potentially creative Sandown proposal.
Farrell Boyce
North Saanich