Last night I went to a Public Hearing in Maple Ridge on a proposed city amendment to turn the historic Jackson Farm into a sub-division. Now you’ve got to live in Maple Ridge to really understand how important Jackson Farm is to the community. The farm goes way, way back and the Jackson’s were and are loved by all. Nearly every speaker, whether in favour or opposed to the subdivision prefaced there comments by telling a personal anecdote about their wonderful relationship with the Jackson’s. Now, the most important thing to consider here is that the Jackson’s wanted their farm turned into a park or used in some way for agriculture; they did not want a sub-division.

However, City Council, in their ineffable wisdom decided not only to go against the Jackson’s but to go against every single guiding principle, planning document, and policy directive that is supposed to guide their decision making. The guiding documents that should be informing city decision making here include the official community plan, the vision 2025 document, the 45 Maple Ridge City Principles, regional and local agricultural goals, the Staff Report, the Strategic Plan, Urban Reserve Policy, Livable Region Strategy, Smart Growth principles, and the Metro Vancouver Growth Plan, among others. There are no “big-picture” planning documents that support turning Jackson Farm into a sub-division. Yet city council decided to make a colossal compromise by turning part of the farm into a park and part into a 112 unit monster-home sub-division, in a desperate attempt to walk the political tight-rope. In doing so they think they are pleasing everyone a little bit, but this modern political trick rarely works.

Citizens want leaders to follow their own rules and make tough decisions based on interpretation of those rules. If the rules and guiding principles are unclear, which is not the case here, then politicians should make them clear by following good process, procedure, principle and a whack of citizen involvement. The “order of magnitude” study flouted by the city is a cop-out. Good decision making is not about making trade-offs and compromises – it is about following the guidelines, rules and recommendations set up by years if not decades of thoughtful decision-making by area leaders.

Three cheers to City Council for having a public process here, but they should have had the entire public process before they made up their minds on how to proceed. The previous public process in 2006 was held on a weekday afternoon, when many folks were working. Now they just have a giant line-up of mostly pissed-off, but quite respectful, citizens – 250 of which showed up at city hall last night and waited hours for their turn to speak. Most spoke fervently against the amendment and most of those in favour of the sub-division did so grudgingly because they got half of what they wanted (the lower part of the farm will be turned into a park). It was a beautiful cross-section of society with every age bracket and every political stripe joining together to protest against a bad decision.

The reasons cited against the farm outnumbered those in favour by 180 to 17 (yes I counted them). I will not list them all here of course but they included the fact that the land is urban reserve and in the green zone, that the city is not supposed to be endorsing sub-divisions this far outside of town because it leads to sprawl, that schools in the area are already packed, and that roads are full of traffic, that there is much available land downtown for densification, there is no area plan, no water studies, no analysis of local wells, no groundwater assessment, that it will increase taxes on many fronts, it will put at least 250 more cars and trucks on the streets, that adjacent ALR lands will now be more open to developer-led land speculation, that most residents up there already must haul water in, and one person even counted how many dogs and cats have been killed on the local roads up there near Jackson Farm and estimated that pet deaths would thus increase with a new sub-division. And the list goes on and on.

Maple Ridge sells itself as a “green” community. Just look at the city web-site. It is full of “green” marketing. The city also proudly sells itself as a leader in community development. The OCP is all about “smart growth” principles. Yet this amendment proposed by the city is none of these things.

One last thing – a personal grievance – it burns my butt to see citizens show up at these hearings and say “good job, Mayor”, or “bad job, Mayor”, when they could at least give a short explanation of why they think it is good or a bad job. There were plenty of these folks at City Hall last night, and unfortunately most of them were in favour of the sub-division. It reflects poorly on democracy when someone goes to the effort of showing up at City Hall, waits hours to speak, and then says 5 words without explaining the rationale behind their feelings. Some of these folks may have been shy, but most certainly did not look shy to me.