OUR GOALS

1) Who Decides?

Local citizens are concerned that our widely accepted and science-based Regional Growth Strategy (RGS) will be seriously compromised if development corporations' applications for change are part of the current ten-year review process.

Development proposals should be considered on the basis of the existing Strategy and the Official Community Plans (OCPs) that implement it. Developers who want to change our OCPs to create "investment opportunties" for their clients should be asked to wait until citizens and their elected official have reviewed the OCPs and RGS.

In short, we want to save our Growth Management Strategy by ensuring the Official Community Plans that implement it are changed only where such change benefits the social, environmental, or economic sustainability of our region.

Citizens need to be fully aware of and engaged in the review process if the purpose of our RGS is not to be undermined by inappropriate and self-interested development proposals.

SOS is a clearing-house for information for citizens organizing against this development. You can send factual information you want posted to the site or included in an e-mail to .

2) Proposal for Area A that undermines our RGS

Canadian Property Investments (1997) Inc. through Cable Bay Lands Inc. has proposed that 500+ acres, starting at Dodd Narrows be redesignated Suburban residential/Resort Development. These lands are presently designated Rural Resource and Open Spaces Lands and they are within the City of Nanaimo political boundary.

Their proposal flies in the face of our GMS and Official Community Plans. It is well outside the Urban Containment Boundaries and it relies on city water and sewer. Access is planned from Duke Point highway - something we were promised would never happen when that road was built.

The proposal, if it is allowed to go ahead, will create an insular, exclusive community with a golf course, 200,000 square feet of boutique and commerical resort center, a hotel, a 200 slip marina (next to Dodd Narrows, 6 high-rise apartments, townhouses, single-family homes, and a road right through Cable Bay Trail. The development, which includes time-shares and other forms of non-resident housing, will add 6000 people to Cedar/Yellowpoint .

It will also radically change the rural nature of the existing community and the Cable Bay Trail as well as threaten environmentally sensitive areas such as Dodd Narrows and the Garry Oak Meadow. We wonder how small, carved-out areas like these can be protected with 6000 people plus golfers and others tramping through them on a regular basis.

Some call this kind of development "parasitic." It will depend on the services of Nanaimo but be separate, remote, and most likely gated.