May 30

May 30 SOME THOUGHTS ON THE MAY 29th CITY COUNCIL MEETING (aka: ANOTHER UPDATE ON THE 'MARYSVILLE MCDONALDS' PROPOSAL)

At the Regular Meeting of Council on the evening of May 29th, the ‘Marysville McDonalds’ proposal (also officially referred to by the less memorable name of: OCP Bylaw 2732 and Zoning Bylaw 2733 - 1006 304th Street and 361 315th Avenue) received it’s second reading in front of council (if you’d like to go back to check out the first reading from February + a bunch more information that was put together a couple weeks ago, including a Q&A with City Councillor Sue Cairns, check out this previous post).

I don’t know about anyone else, but I was actually looking forward to tuning into last night’s live council meeting stream (while also watching game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals on another screen + anxiously watching the Alberta election results coming in on my phone), as it felt like surely this would be the moment that we’d finally get to see a proper discussion/debate amongst the final decision makers about all of the concerns that have been brought forward about this proposal since the first reading was passed 3 months ago (ie. hundreds of local signatories OPPOSED to the proposal via open letters & petitions have been sent to the city since then, while also only receiving less than a handful in favour, as well as ANOTHER city staff report stating stuff like “staff are unable to provide a recommendation in support of further readings of the bylaws due to inconsistencies with the OCP and the implications of losing key industrial land supply”… to name but just a few of the red flags that have been flagged since the broader public first started to become aware of this proposal).

Unfortunately, once again, there seemed to be a dismissive attitude by the mayor to publicly acknowledge any of the many concerns that people have been trying to make heard these last few months, and there seemed to be a not so subtle push to just get to the vote on moving towards a public hearing before anyone realized that there was an opportunity to just put a stop to the whole proposal last night (ironically, the mayor referenced how “the city report recommends a public hearing” as a reason why to just get straight to voting on the public hearing… conveniently leaving out EVERYTHING ELSE the city reports have said in opposition to this whole proposal from before the first reading).

Or at least that was my overriding feeling while watching — but you can check out the ‘Marysville McDonalds’ part of last night’s council meeting, starting at the 31:30 mark, and see/hear for yourself if your intuition picks up on a similar vibe (it’s about a 20 minute discussion and the embed below should jump right to it).

Now, I am not opposed to the general idea of public hearings — BUT — given how much has already been heard from the public, it really did feel like there was more than enough reasons/information to recognize that re-zoning some of Kimberley’s very limited UNCONTAMINATED industrial land for a McDonalds-GasStation-CarWash should be a clear non-starter, especially given the wide range of concerns & opposition already presented to the city at this point (from citizens and business owners and the city’s own staff reports and the city’s own Official Community Plan and Interior Health and…).

And given the way the mayor seemed quite set to get to the public hearing vote without having to first publicly address any of the many reasons to be outright opposed to this proposal, cutting councillors off and putting a cap on what they should talk about or how many questions/statements could be made before calling for the vote, I get the sense that he was also aware that the whole proposal was very susceptible to getting shut down, without even going to a public hearing, if councillors were allowed to have more of an open dialogue before voting.

Shoutout to the 3 city councillors (Woody Maguire, Sue Cairns, and Jason McBain) that still voted ‘No’ to moving to a public hearing; clearly they also feel that there is already more than enough information and opposition to this proposal to not justify spending EVEN MORE time/energy/budget considering it — but 4 votes beats 3 votes, so I guess we’re now looking at TWO public hearings at the end of June (the city hasn’t officially put anything in their Public Notices section on their website at the time of me writing this sentence, BUT, according to last night’s meeting, there should be an in-person public hearing at McKim School on June 27th @ 7pm and a telephone-version on June 28th @ 7pm).

Much later in last night’s council meeting, after the vote to move towards a public hearing had been locked down, the mayor seemed a lot more open to allowing councillor Sue Cairns to speak freely on concerns with the ‘Marysville McDonalds’ proposal, and you can hear her share some of what she wasn’t allowed to say earlier at the 1:53:42 mark of the meeting (again, the embed below should jump straight to that part… and since it is just a statement and not a conversation about the statement, since the vote on the reading had already been called, it’ll only take you about 3 minutes to watch/listen and then you can also wonder why there seemed to be such a push to not allow this information to be openly discussed BEFORE asking council to vote on the matter).

And, finally, at least as far as the ‘Marysville McDonalds’ proposal is concerned, starting at around the 2:02:48 mark, the floor was opened to allow for a limited amount of question time from members of the public who showed up to last night’s meeting in-person (and the embed below should jump straight to that).

Now, I’m sure a 15-minute question period at the end of a 2 hour council meeting is not a perfect representation of what to expect from the public hearings on this ‘Marysville McDonalds’ proposal — BUT — I do worry that what we’re heading for is a room full of people re-expressing things that have already been put down in writing, OVERWHELMINGLY in opposition to this proposal (from open letters to petitions to official reports), and because I’m sure there will be a few people to also speak in favour of the proposal at the public hearings (mentioning things like tax bases and jobs for teenagers and “budget” food prices), we’re going to end up in this situation where we’ll have a couple evenings of contentious personal opinions & anecdotal theories to add to the overall noise… and then we’ll be right back in the same situation where it all comes down to what 6 city councillors and 1 mayor end up voting for/against.

And, to me, it’s been the continued lack of PUBLIC discussion and debate from all of the 7 humans that are actually going to have the final say on this matter that has been the most discouraging part of this process (and last night’s meeting seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally have that public debate/discussion between all 7 voters… but I guess that’s not how city council meetings work).

Because if receiving hundreds of signatories and official reports in OPPOSITION of this proposal has not already been enough to form a ‘for’ or ‘against’ opinion on whether to change an industrial zone to a commercial zone (and, in this specific case, that zoning change is being requested by someone wanting to put in a McDonalds-GasStation-CarWash, as much as the mayor seems set on avoiding talking specifically about the negatives of that specific type of proposed development… even though he didn’t seem to have a problem sharing cherry-picked positives about that kind of development on his own Facebook page back in March) — it kinda feels like we’re heading towards two nights of people verbalizing fragments of what has already been received in written format and then we’re going to end up at another 4-3 vote (although, tbf… two councillors did not speak on the proposal at this latest reading, so maybe councillors Steven Royer and Kevin Dunnebacke are more undecided at the moment than how councillor Sandra Roberts came across when she spoke on the matter last night).

Because what more can be said that hasn’t already been said? How many more city reports advising against this zoning change proposal need to be added to the list of documents? How much more public pushback is required until that pushback gets acknowledged & addressed publicly? How much longer are the public meant to stay engaged on this topic? I guess we’ll have to wait until at least the end of June to find out.

So, in closing, to avoid having to repeat a bunch of what has already been said, I invite you to jump back to this previous ‘Marysville McDonalds’ post + Q&A with city councillor Sue Cairns for a pretty good run down of information + links to more information — AND THEN — I guess make sure to keep an eye out for official announcements on the upcoming public hearings from the City of Kimberley (ps - here’s a past video from the city that’ll give you an idea of what to expect from a Public Hearing, if interested).

And, in the meantime… I’ll be over here ironically rooting for the Denver Nuggets in the NBA Finals while also rooting against the purveyors of chicken nuggets at these upcoming public hearings 🙃

JEREMY / @HI54LOFI