McQUARRIE – Don’t we want City councillors to express their opinions?
IT LOOKS LIKE SILLY SEASON is officially underway as one city councillor feels the Kamloops Official Community Plan (OCP) would better serve the public if called the ‘Official Community Guidelines.’ Or at least so it would appear, according to recent comments by Councillor Arjun Singh.
In a recent piece by CFJC’s, James Peters, he writes that Councillor Singh sees the OCP as simply a guideline. Not a plan but just a guideline and I’m curious to know why Singh feels the downgrade is required.
According to the city’s own website, the OCP states, “…all bylaws and works undertaken by Council must be consistent with the OCP.” There is no ‘should’ or ‘maybe’ about it.
The recently revised OCP is single-minded in its direction when it comes to densification. Urban sprawl must, according to the plan, come to an end.
Bill McQuarrie is a Kamloops entrepreneur. He can be contacted at billmcquarrie@gmail.com. He tweets @bafflegabbed.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Again Bill,it’s time you ran for Mayor.
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On the other hand, if densification is the policy etched in stone, why waste everyone’s time having a public hearing?
No doubt, there will be people living nearby who might prefer not to have multi-family units next to them. From personal experience, we now have parking problems, visibility issues, pedestrian safety issues and no time to get to know the single family members we were promised as there seems to be a high turnover of people in and out of the “single family duplexes”. These were issues raised by those who attended a rezoning meeting and our concerns were dismissed.
As for recusing oneself from a public hearing because of bias, that may be a question posed to Mr. Singh before the upcoming election.
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