Editor’s Note: Good morning and welcome to SHIFT News. Today we have Comox Valley reporter Colleen Dane here with the first of a two-part series on the critical roll that local residents can play in the creation of the Comox Valley Regional Growth Strategy (RGS).

In part one, Dane takes a look at the background of the RGS and the power that local residents have to influence how neighbourhoods, rural areas and communities across the region develop over the next two decades. On Wednesday, part two will examine the contentious local politics that led to the split of the Comox Strathcona Regional District and the eventual need for a comprehensive Regional Growth Strategy.

Along with it, we bring an advance look at the RGS counterpart – the Comox Valley Sustainability Strategy (CVSS) – as videographer Hans Peter Meyer sits down with Lead CVSS Consultant Mark Holland to talk shop about why environmental planning is crucial in the face of growth and development. Dane will be tackling this topic later this month.

Get talking, ask questions, tell us what you think. This is your newsroom:

There’s a really great strip of blacktop just outside the city limits where Fraser Road connects the old Island Highway to Minto. Its narrow, un-shouldered lanes curve a bit over the train tracks as it weaves its way past farms, work sites and old homes, connecting the generations who have traveled it.

It’s a road with a lot of character — and I always wonder how long that personality I love so much is going to last.

You’ll find many of those places in the Comox Valley — places that people relate to and work hard to protect. Those are spaces where personal connection, memory and experience deeply shape debate over development and change.

There are other places though, where the land’s potential for a different use is what is inspiring. Those are the parcels where people wouldn’t mind seeing denser housing, their favourite box store, wider roadways or taller buildings that bring personality and services to the region.

The Regional Growth Strategy (RGS) – set to go before the public next Monday (Nov. 23) as a team looks for comments, recommendations and debate from local residents -  will help determine the difference between those areas and what will happen to them in the next 20 years.

The fact is that growth is inevitable.

Where the public can intervene is by saying how that unstoppable growth happens.

The first draft of the RGS, currently under development by local government, consultant planners and the community, is nearly ready to be revealed.

Once completed, it will be a binding document — one to forecast the social, economic and environmental terrain of the Valley. Now’s the time for you to look around and assess what about the Comox Valley you want to preserve, where you want to see growth, where there could be improvement.

This map is the community’s to make.

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Strategies, reports, formal consultation and policy writing don’t often catch the interest of the public. It’s a constant challenge for facilitators and politicians to engage residents when the real-life implications of this sort of policy seem vague.

Policies that include words like “sustainability” and “growth”  particularly challenge people, because they often address high-level issues that don’t lend themselves well to involvement from the community. Seldom do they inspire the engagement of local residents to be active participants in how the document is developed.

And while the RGS is in its literal form a pile of papers, in reality it serves as a heavily debated forum that gives shape to all the things that we like and don’t like about the land, economy and services around us.

It’s that vacant lot you drive past each day on your way to work and wonder “what’s going in there?”

It’s the local farm where your favourite treats come from that could either be protected in perpetuity or subdivided for a housing development.

It’s a greenspace that makes your heart happy on a quiet afternoon walk.

It may even be the difference between whether your kids have an apartment in town to rent when they one day move out or if they are forced to head to another city to make a life because one here is beyond their budget.

The RGS will, in it’s final product, outline what can be built in certain areas of the Comox Valley, but that’s not as simple as just colouring a map.

When consultants first began the process of developing a Regional Growth Strategy, they pulled together a preliminary background document – Understanding Our Choices. The full text is available online HERE.

It lays out some basic statistics of what the Comox Valley looks like now, and what it could look like in the years to come as experts estimate the population of the Comox Valley will reach 88,500 by 2031 – which brings the addition of nearly 20,000 residents.

That kind of increase, according to the report, means they have to consider wider roadways, another crossing over the Courtenay River, a new garbage dump site and of course, where more housing (and the services their residents will require) could be built.

It points out issues the community faces — such as the challenge of providing water for homes and businesses, the increased challenges of homelessness and crime and the local economy’s shift from natural resource-based industry.

The RGS creates a Valley-wide plan that allows for solutions. It ensures that the Comox Valley is not caught in the precarious position of being reactionary in the midst of a bustling economy and strong growth. Its development guidelines will be put in place in order to manage it and keep the Comox Valley a place that remains attractive for people at all stages in their lives.

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The background document, released in June this year, was the first step for consultants Urban Strategies Inc., Ecoplan International and Ear to the Ground Planning, in creating such a place.

That paper sets the groundwork for the broader plan by looking at the current status and future needs in nine community-defining categories that consder all aspects of business and residential life in the Comox Valley.

Those include population/demographics, housing/affordability, local economic development, transportation, agriculture and food security, parks and natural areas, regional services, public health and safety and climate change.

In essence, it estimates how many houses will need to be built in the Comox Valley, what kind of services the people living there will look for, what kind of work those homeowners will do, how they will get to work and more.

The background paper reveals the details of a community that is going to have to figure out how to care for the retired population that is a major factor in its solid growth while drawing in and keeping young people and working families.

This encompasses a huge swath of general and special interests from master planning for housing to ensuring that cyclists and other alternative transportation options are built into the mix.

As more community input is pulled into the mix, consultants will us that information to do a bit of fortune telling — looking at the potential effects of everything from restrictive development to unchecked sprawl on communities, neighborhoods and acreage across the Comox Valley

The final pages of the background document gave four vague potential visions — ranging from allowing development only where there are settlement areas now to allowing it anywhere.

In the case of my favourite stretch of Fraser Road, the RGS as an overall development guideline could protect that space if the most restrictive development options are chosen.

The loosest would likely see that area change dramatically in the years to come. There are no formal plans on that road. But it’s so close to town, it’s so connected, it’s so appealing.

Mapping out which of those options the community supports now gives direction to government when proposals come before them. It gives them a vision to strive for, and could minimize reactive decisions made in the council chambers.

What that means is, if you are thinking that this process is too high level for you or your neighbours to plug into and effect change, you might want to rethink that.

Feedback collected all Summer by consultants is building this policy to guide governments literally neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

The draft strategy will take into account the issues for families who live around Bill Moore Park and retirees with acreage in Black Creek. It looks at the preservation of historic buildings and areas and where new community spaces can be made.

It assesses where our food will come from, how it will get to us, the potential for our kids to learn and for us to make a living.

The first draft of the Regional Growth Strategy will come back to the community for further discussion with the public meetings scheduled next week.

• On Nov. 23, from 5 to 7:30 p.m., they be at the Cumberland Cultural Centre.
• On Nov. 24, from 5 to 7:30 p.m., they’ll present at the Merville Hall.
• On Nov. 25, from 1 to 3:30 p.m., they’ll host an open house at the Comox Valley Regional District boardroom in Courtenay, and from 5 to 7 p.m. that night, at the d’Esterre House in Comox.

The meetings are created to foster public input, listen to the concerns and requests of residents and ensure they are taken into consideration as policy is hammered out.

Local residents are being asked to consider their community and where they want it to go. Giving the community a voice, a true sense of place, is the opportunity being presented.

Colleen Dane is a journalist in the Comox Valley and a self-diagnosed News Nerd. She’s lived here for only four years — but with deep family connections in the Valley, she’s awfully attached to the area and what happens to it.