An evaluation of official community plans in Metro Vancouver
Creators: name: Desjarlais, Lecia Rose
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2017

description: Municipal planners and city councils are guided by official community plans when making decisions about their community. A plan is a vision of the future and is a primary tool to influence the future growth and development of a community (Dalton, 1989). They are an instrument of public policy and attempt to address both large and small scale goals and represents the interests of many different stakeholders. This project evaluates municipal official community plans in Metro Vancouver in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Plan evaluation was uncommon until recently due to a lack of consensus on what constitutes a good plan, evaluation protocols that were difficult to validate and generalize, and difficulty obtaining planning documents. This project evaluates the quality of 20 Metro Vancouver plans using three different protocols, the Internal and External Quality protocol by Berke, Godschalk, and Kaiser (2006) and Communicative and Persuasive Quality protocol by Bunnell and Jepson’s (2011), and is supplemented by the Online Communication Quality protocol that is designed to capture digital attributes of municipal planning websites and documents. Notwithstanding the importance and the demands placed on municipal Official Community Plans (OCPs) in the region, this study identifies significant gaps and areas of oversight in plan quality. This led to a series of recommendations and identification of examples of best practices. Foremost, municipalities should draw on the practices used by their neighbours. Other municipalities are a rich resource for ideas and municipal planners can quickly identify missing elements from their own plan by reviewing other municipal OCPs. The following is a list of recommendations from easiest to more challenging to implement: • Ensure the municipal website includes the five basic questions to a complete story (Who, What, When, Why, and How) when describing the OCP. • Optimize the PDF when creating the OCP for digital upload. It does not take extensive technical expertise to add small and useful features to the PDF to increase usability and appeal. • Be comprehensive in the amount of basic factual information about the municipality (demographic information, present state of services and infrastructure, etc.). Many small facts (sometimes obvious to municipal planners) can add up to a comprehensive picture of the current state of the municipality and be helpful to people not already familiar with the community. • Organize policies under a hierarchy of goals and objectives to help clearly and logically organize the OCP. Doing so demonstrates how policies are linked to the challenges in the community as well as reflects the community’s values and aspirations. • Better integrate the goals, objectives, and policies outlined in the municipality’s Regional Context Statement throughout the sections of the OCP document. • Explain and compare alternate scenarios or forecasts for housing and population growth. • Include specific actions that are quantifiable, measurable, and comparable to an earlier baseline period. • Analyze land demand and supply and highlight the challenges and opportunities the municipality faces for future growth. This study is a small step towards critical evaluation of municipal plans in a region faced with significant planning issues. Planners must be willing to improve planning practices within their own municipality and foster a culture of mutual learning and self-improvement. This will enable municipalities in Metro Vancouver to respond to increasingly complex planning issues facing the region in the future.