Vote on farmland split 4-2
An exclusion application will be sent to the land commission for property along Lougheed Highway
Pitt Meadows councillor Janis Elkerton
Photograph by: submitted , for the TIMES
Pitt Meadows council voted this week 4-2 in favour of trying to pull land out of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) for commercial development.
The application to exclude a strip of land along Lougheed Highway from the ALR was the subject of a public hearing on Sept. 17, and the minutes from that meeting will be forwarded with the application to the Agricultural Land Commission.
Councillors Janis Elkerton and Dave Murray voted against the exclusion application at Tuesday's meeting.
Because of the furor over the application and with storefronts empty in Pitt Meadows, Elkerton said she doesn't believe the exclusion application will be successful.
"My intuition is [the ALC is] not going to take it out," she said.
Elkerton said she is hearing from a lot of Pitt Meadows residents that council is not listening to them, both on this and on other issues - like a petition that was collected asking for a zero-per-cent tax increase.
"I think the public is getting fed up," Elkerton said.
Voting in favour of the resolution were Pitt Meadows Mayor Deb Walters, and Councillors Doug Bing, Gwen O'Connell, and Tracy Miyashita. Coun. Bruce Bell was absent from the meeting.
Council was presented in the summer with three concepts for a land exclusion application, and they favoured one that was called an "intensive employment
centre" with 43 per cent mixed employment use, 34 per cent retail-commercial, and 23 per cent retail or mixed employment.
The plan is to remove almost 33 hectares of land from the ALR.
According to the staff report, the concept that council chose would pay for the future North Lougheed Connector, a road that is designed to take traffic off Old Dewdney Trunk Road.
The strip of land is on the north side of Lougheed Highway going east.
