So Much For Due Process

Information pertinent to the following can be found on the City Of Nanaimo website, http://www.city.nanaimo.bc.ca by searching the Council Agendas and Minutes for Jeffs, Jeff's, Jeff s or Watt.

Once again, I am astounded at the lengths which the City of Nanaimo, their staff and the project proponents would go through in order to "have their way" in this case. Paying $250 for a Special Public Hearing on Thursday, Dec. 18/03 on their rezoning of 6950 Island Highway North (the Jeffs property) seems like a very wise investment by Watt Ventures. Having already arranged to have the extension of the Urban Containment Boundary and the Regional Context Statement change dealt with by the Regional District of Nanaimo (RDN) on August 12/03, at the height of the summer vacation period, it doesn't surprise me at all that the rezoning Public Hearing would now be arranged to occur at the height of the Christmas shopping/party/vacation period, barely one week before Christmas. Councillor Loyd Sherry had suggested that I give up yet another evening of my time and travel all the way down to City Hall so that I may have the opportunity to express my thoughts on Watt Ventures' proposal to him and the rest of City Council. While I have learned from experience that it is not always 'helpful' for a citizen to inform the bureaucracy of their intentions in advance, I told him that I wouldn't be there.
When I take the time and trouble to prepare and make a presentation to Council and no further mention is made of that fact or any of the points I made in any of the subsequent staff reports on this issue, when a City Councillor implies that Area 'D' Regional Director Haime is lying and Mayor Korpan "calls the kettle black", when Councillor McNabb and Mayor Korpan both act contrary to published commitments not to seek to take any Lantzville land into the City without the Area Director's consent, when Council goes against its own policy of infill before expansion despite numerous vacancies in all of the existing malls and with similar, commercial properties already in the city, when previous conditions/requirements are suddenly dropped/ignored, when Lantzville is, contrary to the 'Municipal Boundary Extension Criteria', virtually ignored in the annexation process, when the City accepts an inducement for annexing and rezoning the Jeffs property, when the City passes a motion requiring their RDN Directors to support all motions having to do with the Jeffs property, when Mayor Korpan seeks to embarrass/ridicule our Mayor and Area Director in the local papers, while distorting the truth/playing loose with the facts, when City staff make a mockery out of the Urban Containment and Fringe Area Management Implementation Agreement by convincing the Intergovernmental Advisory Committee to change the definition of 'community needs', when the 'Needs assessment' done for the annexation of the Jeffs property doesn't even address the required criteria, when the spelling of 'Jeffs' (try Jeff's and Jeff s) is conveniently 'mishandled' so that someone searching for relevant documents on the City's website won't find them all, when one of the required Official Community Plan (OCP) Amendment notification signs disappears after a maximum of only 3 days on the property and when the OCP Amendment process does not follow the established procedures, I don't believe that anything I could say at the Public Hearing would make any difference in the destination of this "runaway train barrelling down the tracks" so I chose instead to spend the time with my family and friends - the "fix" was obviously already in.