Surrey Councillor Bob Bose said Mayor Dianne Watts’ plan to add nearly 500 acres of parkland to Metro Vancouver’s Green Zone will do little to protect it from development.
“What rankles me is the attempt to claim that this improves the security of these properties,” said Bose, a council hopeful in Surrey’s Nov. 15 election. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Surrey recently announced that six parks totalling 489 acres would be added to Metro Vancouver’s Green Zone, a collection of parkland properties across the region.
While the label provides protection against development, the designation can be repealed if a majority of directors in the regional authority vote against it, Bose said.
Jackson Farm, a 39-acre Maple Ridge property, went before the Metro board last Friday. Less than two-thirds of directors – including Bose, who attended in Mayor Watts’ place – voted to keep the area in the Green Zone.
Bose said Surrey parkland could easily face similar votes.
“There’s no guarantee that the parks won’t be developed,” he said.
The best way to protect Surrey’s parks would be to enact protective city bylaws that can only be repealed by a public referendum, Bose added.
Watts said removing a local park from the Green Zone is not an easy task.
The motion has to pass a Surrey council vote before it goes to the Metro board for approval.
“It’s a two level approval process, which makes it more difficult,” she said.
Asked if strict city bylaws for Surrey’s parks would offer better protection than putting them in the Green Zone, Watts said she’s open to all options.
“If there’s another way to do it, I’m all for it,” she said. “Because at the end of the day the goal is to protect that land.”
Geoff Dembicki is a staff reporter for the Hook.
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Fiat lux
3 years ago
Why is destruction always
Why is destruction always called "development" ?
As far the protection of farmland is concerned, in a world running out of food and millions starving to death every year,
watch for BC farming and ranching being destroyed by price fixing by the controllers of the markets and the Chinese coming in with their $3.trillion of hoarded, but worthless US dollars buying up the land. They're already doing it on other continents
Of course, our economists and politicians will jump for joy for all that "wealth creating foreign investment" pouring in.
Ed Deak.
leftofcentre
3 years ago
Bob Bose is the King of Urban Sprawl
This is a guy who's chiefly responsible for the sprawl that is in Guildford, and is now infesting Morgan Crossing. The sooner he's defeated the better.