Save Our Southlands

The description of the Southlands Community Planning Team in a recent article about Southlands development brought to mind another group of community volunteers.

They too worked long hours in a team setting. In cooperation with municipal planners and through community input, they formulated a vision for Tsawwassen.

They met with the mayor and council, with business groups and other stakeholders, seeking to build consensus. And at the end of their labour, in November of 1992, the Tsawwassen Area Plan was released. Among its provisions was this statement:

"Objective D.1: Preserve Agricultural Land -- To preserve the farmlands within the Southlands for agricultural uses, thus reinforcing the Official Community Plan objective of preserving farmland for the food production needs of future generations."

Now, as we have discovered in the recent past, a community plan is to be considered as a rough guide, not a set of rules cast in stone. However this plan, which is still in force, bears revisiting.

The citizens of 1992 showed support for the preservation of the Southlands as agricultural land. But the volunteers and planners developing the area plan also realized that growth was necessary as well. The solution they eventually settled on was a trade off: increased density in the core in exchange for keeping the Southlands as farmland.

The Century Group has certainly built up the centre of town using the guidelines for density set out in the area plan. How has it responded to the Tsawwassen Area Plan vision for the Southlands?

Well, to begin with, in 1993 it launched a multi-million dollar piece of litigation personally suing council members, the mayor and the municipal planning director as well as the municipality. The lawsuit was eventually found to have no merit.

They have also torn down the historic Spetifore barns, threatened greenhouses time and again, allowed native heritage sites on the property to be interfered with and generally been as obstructive as possible.

To review: Century Group was able to purchase the Southlands at a fire-sale price when community opposition to the Tsawwassen Development Ltd. proposal made rezoning approval unlikely.

It was then able to build up the core thanks to the guidelines of the Tsawwassen Area Plan.

Now it wishes to use a "community process" of its own design to subvert the goals of the very plan it has profited from.

Let's be clear. The agricultural zoning of the Southlands and its designation in the Tsawwassen Area Plan have withstood a major legal challenge as well as the passage of time. As weeds grow taller on the land and Century Group moves its development plans forward, the whole process of putting housing on farmland may begin to seem more and more inevitable.

But 35 years of failed development schemes show the outcome is anything but assured.

Dave Staniforth

Click here to sign an online petition requesting inclusion of the Southlands in the ALR.