The Editor,
Re. "Concerns raised over PoMo OCP" (The Tri-City News, March 15).
The draft of Port Moody's official community plan is a document that, among many other alarming changes, would usher in a wall of 20-storey highrises, a strip mall on steroids running through Moody Centre, and turn quiet neighbourhoods into swaths of six-storey buildings.
During the March 12 Port Moody council meeting, at which the proposed plan was unveiled, I couldn't help but think of the grandiose plans for freeway construction through Vancouver in the 1960s, when residents of Strathcona, Chinatown and Gastown were told to make way for the bulldozers - step aside, suckers, you can't stop progress.
Now it's 2013 and we're told we must surrender their neighbourhoods not to a freeway but, we are told, to accommodate SkyTrain. Although public transit may seem on the surface like a more defensible reason for wiping out large sections of a unique and lovely place, the situation isn't that much different. New excuse, same hubris: step aside, suckers, bulldozers are coming.
Aside from the plan and how it strong-arms our town, the way in which it has taken shape is more than a little worrying -- particularly the fickle changes of building heights in large areas of the plan in the past few weeks. At the council meeting I attended, there was no ready explanation, for instance, as to why the site now occupied by the Flavelle cedar mill is now slated for 28-storey buildings while the plan only a few weeks back set the maximum at 12 storeys on the site. Other areas have seen building heights bounce from three to six storeys and back to three again. With its fluctuating numbers, the OCP map is starting to look a little like a Keno machine. It does not inspire faith in the city's claim that its vision for Port Moody is dictated by rock-solid planning principles.
I urge people to speak out about this draft plan in the coming weeks and months because the early version endorsed by council last week will, if unchanged, turn peaceful Moody Centre into something that could kindly be called Metrotown East.
Mark Falkenberg, Port Moody
