Arts&life: Jim Byrnes pays tribute to blues roots. 25
Municipal: Pitt Meadows wants nothing to do with medical marijuana grow ops. 3 Kids’ Tickets Start at
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Silver Valley unfolding slower than planned Mayoral candidate promises new school B y P h i l M e l nyc h u k pmelnychuk@mapleridgenews.com
Silver Valley – the suburb stuck on a mountain in north Maple Ridge – is unfolding as it should, just not as fast as planned. The Silver Valley area plan was written in 2002. Since development started, spopulation has grown slower than expected, while more people are living in each of the homes in the verdant mountainside suburb at the north end of 232nd Street. “I think those growth projections that we thought we were going to meet, haven’t been met,” Mayor Ernie Daykin said Tuesday. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It’s a healthy pace.” Monday, council reviewed another update on the area, following one that was done in 2010. See Silver Valley, 3
Colleen Flanagan/THE NEWS
Haunted house
Matt Jonatschick outside Glenhurst Manor Haunted House, which opens this weekend. Admission is by cash donation or a non-perishable food item for the Friends In Need Food Bank. See story, 11.
City hall asks for planning help Request for more staffers to keep pace B y P h i l M e l nyc h u k pmelnychuk@mapleridgenews.com
City hall is being snowed under with building plans and development applications and needs some help to cope with the backlog. But it’s going to cost another $400,000 next year and just under half a million dollars five years from now, if Maple Ridge council gives the
go ahead to hire four new city planners. “Sometimes you physically do not have enough staff to deal with all the applications in the queue,” chief administrator Jim Rule told council Monday. Staff try to have pre-application meetings and check lists and to reduce the number of steps required for new buildings and suburbs. “At some point, you hit the law of diminishing returns.” Maple Ridge has only five people in its planning department – compared
to eight in Coquitlam and 19 in Surrey. Planning staff are managing 51 applications per employee, compared to 11 files in Langley township and 23 in Coquitlam. Maple Ridge currently has 256 active files, while Pitt Meadows has 27. Since the downtown building incentive plan in 2011, the city has been deluged with proposals to put up more condo buildings. Initially, staff expected that to produce another 10 applications. Instead, there were 80. Coun. Mike Morden, running for
mayor, said the report detailing the need for more planners doesn’t deal with the length of time people have to wait for their applications to wend through city hall. “I don’t really see that addressed in this report.” He needs to know that hiring four new staff will reduce those times. “The feedback I get from the development community is the fees they pay for permits are not their key concern.” Instead, it’s consistent and timely processing of applications.
“To me, that needs to be our key objective,” Morden added. According to the National Association for Industrial and Office Parks, Maple Ridge’s combined fees for rezoning, subdivision and building permits are 22 per cent below average. By raising those fees five per cent, the city could pay for a quarter of the extra cost of the new staffers, which include a planner, planning technician, plan checker and subdivision technologist. See Planning, 24
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