Despite one councillor’s attempt to get staff to draft the bylaw amendments needed for Trellis Seniors Services to move forward, the rest of Sechelt council wasn’t on board.
On June 7, Coun. Darnelda Siegers asked council to reconsider a motion regarding the proposed Trellis long-term care facility that had been defeated at a May 24 planning committee meeting.
The motion was to allow staff to draft the needed official community plan (OCP) and zoning amendment bylaws for the Trellis to receive first reading.
Councillors at the planning meeting had previously defeated the motion, saying instead they wanted to develop district policies around institutional care that would make the requirements clear for Trellis and other applicants eyeing Sechelt as a location for seniors’ facilities.
Siegers said she felt both the development of district policies and the drafting of the needed bylaws for Trellis could happen at the same time. “This could be a test case to be able to clarify on a real application that’s in front of us, how this would move forward,” Siegers said.
“This is only the beginning of this. We do need to have community input. We do need to have our staff look at this in depth, but we need to actually give a signal that we are willing to look at this and engage the community in this project. So I’d like to see us start the process here at council.”
Other councillors weren’t swayed by her argument, with Coun. Noel Muller noting he was originally against the motion because the proponents themselves had asked to have the report on Trellis pulled from the planning agenda, signalling they weren’t ready to proceed yet.
Director of corporate and financial services Doug Stewart explained Trellis had some concerns with that report “and wanted an opportunity to discuss them with us prior to moving forward.”
Some councillors also made reference to a two-page emailed letter from Trellis that detailed some of the company’s concerns (the letter had not been processed by staff and wasn’t ready to be released to the public on June 7).
“It was basically a concern that the views in the staff report needed to be reviewed and discussed and that [Trellis] erroneously thought that an item with their name on it was coming forward this evening,” Mayor Bruce Milne said at the council meeting.
“Basically there was no specifics to the letter but a sense that they understood the OCP better than our staff did and therefore we didn’t really need to revise it and build up the policies on institutions that council and staff think we do.”
When Siegers’ motion to allow staff to draft OCP and zoning bylaw amendments for Trellis was called, only she was in favour and the motion was defeated.
Trellis’s proposed Silverstone Care Centre is envisioned to replace the current long-term care facilities at Totem Lodge and Shorncliffe. The plan calls for 128 long-term care beds, four hospice beds and an adult daycare on a 1.2-hectare site in West Sechelt.
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