Earthquakes worldwide, floods in Alberta and Quebec (and starting to threaten B.C.), tornados ravaging our neighbors to the south, volcanic eruptions in Iceland (again), droughts in the southern U.S.: maybe the world didn’t end on May 21, but it sure hasn’t been easy for a lot of people. There is no doubt that it hasn’t been the best spring here either, but compared to the weather elsewhere, I’ll take it and consider myself lucky.
Severe weather events are predicted to continue to wreak havoc world wide, affecting financial markets, food prices and availability, and energy costs. The City of Nelson can’t do anything about the weather, but the priorities set by council focus on making our community resilient no matter what comes down the pipe. The Path to 2040 Planning process we undertook is now guiding our decisions. The Downtown/Waterfront plan is almost finalized. We are ensuring that our decisions around development opportunities (like the Royal Hotel, the old Savoy Hotel, etc.) are congruent with both the Downtown/Waterfront plan and the Active Transportation Plan. This means that a mixed range of housing as well as commercial opportunities will be available in the future. That way, people like a waitress I met last week (who came for a visit and never left) will be able to find affordable housing.
We are also engaging with our regional partners to find ways to make our transit system operate more efficiently, so that it can continue to be a piece of the puzzle that allows residents to live affordably. The new, smaller bus that BC Transit brought to Nelson mid-May was a North American prototype that may help reduce costs in the future. It was also a very real example of a renewed commitment by BC Transit to help address the issues around transit that many rural communities are experiencing.
The torn up streets that are causing dust and irritation to everyone are a tangible reflection of Nelson Hydro’s planning. When finished later this summer, the downtown will be far less susceptible to power outages, and we won’t have to search far and wide for obsolete replacement parts. In addition, by the end of the year we hope to have all the information we need to make important decisions on whether we will be developing a district heating system for select downtown areas to create energy resiliency for our downtown core.
Our Community Energy and Emissions Action Plan is also nearing completion. The draft plan outlines what community organizations and individuals can do to help reduce carbon emissions, and how the city can help influence and facilitate those actions. The plan outlines actions around land use, transportation, buildings, energy supply and solid waste.
Next week I will be in Halifax at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities annual conference and hope to bring back ideas and strategies from other municipalities that are successfully tackling the challenges of today’s cities: infrastructure, economy, and the environment. In all of these critical areas we’ve done the planning — the challenge moving forward will be to implement the strategies identified to move us towards our vision.
Kim Charlesworth is a Nelson city councillor who shares this space with her colleagues around the table