City of Powell River’s next council will consider a series of recommendations from the climate change mitigation and adaptation committee.
At the August 16 committee of the whole meeting, committee chair CaroleAnn Leishman tabled the recommendations for council’s perusal.
Leishman, who also chaired the climate change committee said she was presenting the final recommendations memo.
“Through the last six months or so, the committee had been looking and working through the province’s CleanBC Roadmap to 2030 and trying to find alliances with city bylaws, city zoning, city policies and any operations that seem to be aligned with some of these recommendations they are making in the roadmap to 2030,” said Leishman. “We had a joint document that members of the committee were all contributing to. This is the culmination of about six months of work by the committee members before the term ended.
“I wanted to bring it forward to committee of the whole to have a look and have it published on an agenda to see the hard work that the [climate change] committee did. These are the main recommendations that they felt were doable or at least could be considered by the next city council.”
Leishman said she was looking for a motion to receive the memo and forwarding it to the next city council’s strategic planning sessions for consideration. Councillor George Doubt made the motion.
Councillor Cindy Elliott said she wanted the climate change committee to know how much she appreciated the work that has been done.
“It’s very clear and evident from the detail and recommendations put forward that there was a ton of work put into this,” said Elliott. “The information and the recommendations – all of the suggestions that they make, indeed will make excellent information to inform the strategic planning process.”
Councillor Maggie Hathaway said the committee had done a tremendous amount of work and she hoped it would be reconstituted by a new council. Leishman was in agreement.
“That committee has attracted some really dynamic members,” added Leishman.
Councillor Rob Southcott said when the committee lost a couple of members a call was put out for new members. He said the committee’s terms of reference were changed so that all five applicants could be included.
“That’s an example of how important this kind of work is to our community,” said Southcott. “People who do this kind of work – engineers and public policy analysts – came in and provided perspective during the time we were all working on this together. The committee did spend a lot of hours with the 75-page CleanBC document from the province, just to really refine and understand how it applies to communities and what could be done with it.”
Committee of the whole carried the motion to refer the climate committee’s recommendations to the next city council’s strategic planning sessions. Recommendations covered subject areas such as low carbon energy, transportation, buildings and community.
