This month, more than 200 people attended the Grandview-Woodland Area Council’s public meeting to complain about the draft community plan that the City of Vancouver has sought to impose on our neighbourhood [“Critics decry Grandview plan”, July 4-11]. At the same time, more than 600 residents have submitted their signatures to an online petition to city council, and hundreds more are signing paper petitions that are circulating throughout Grandview-Woodland.

They reject the idea that the planning department can simply drop these plans on us without any substantive consultation. Hundreds of us have spent endless hours at workshops and open houses over the last year without ever once being asked to give our views on the scale of densification that is now proposed, and without ever once being offered options on land-use and zoning issues that will affect us for a generation.

After dozens of residents told the planning department in no uncertain terms on July 8 that they thought the entire process was flawed—a belief supported by the hundreds of petition signers—it was depressing to hear director of planning Brian Jackson inform council the next day that he was pleased with the levels of public consultation in Grandview-Woodland.

He suggested that staff had made some errors in the Commercial and Broadway plans, but he completely ignored the loud pleas from the citizenry to look at the other areas in which the city’s plans threaten to destroy the integrity and character of our neighbourhood.

This is a plan that is supposed to last a generation, and yet Jackson has so far rejected an extension to his schedule of just a few months that would allow the residents of Grandview-Woodland to examine and comment on the up-zoning proposals in detail.

What is the rush, we are forced to ask? Why don’t they want to hear what we have to say about our own future?

> Jak King / president, Grandview-Woodland Area Council