The most important question concerning housing which faces Oak Bay residents has been omitted from the Official Community Plan survey. This vital question is: Do you agree that Oak Bay should be densified?
The survey implies that the council will densify the municipality and our only input is to suggest how and where the densification might occur. This is intolerable.
People reside in Oak Bay because they love the openness, the smaller building footprints with resulting green space, better traffic and parking conditions; i.e. they enjoy the lack of densification. Oak Bay is not broken. Why fix it?
A second flaw in the housing section of the survey concerns the preamble, “Assume that key issues such as tree protection, parking, traffic, noise and neighbourhood character will be addressed.”
We would be extremely foolish to make such an assumption. These are precisely the issues that are being ignored by the present council who are pushing forward the monster Clive Drive proposal against 500 petitioners thus far from all over Oak Bay.
I respectfully suggest to the mayor that if he wants densification, he should seriously consider resignation, leaving the charm and ambience of undensified Oliver Street and move across one of the bridges to the newly densified areas of Victoria West.
With some help from this biased survey, council wants to ensure that the safeguards against outsized developments in the current OCP will not be in the new one.
Concerned residents can make their views known by appropriate comments on the survey, signing petitions against inappropriate developments and writing letters to council before it is too late and the destruction of Oak Bay commences.
There is a (very amateur) protest song entitled The Death of Oak Bay on YouTube.
E.J. Cockayne
Oak Bay