The Big Pond RV Park: CBRM Planning and the Magic Schoolbus

This will be the third post in a series of posts about the UARB ruling in the case of the Big Pond RV park. As the ruling has not really been covered in the local media, except for in the highly readable and incredibly well-researched Cape Breton Spectator, I've decided to write about some of its main findings. 

In the first post, The Case of the Other Case, I wrote about the UARB assigning “less weight” to the CBRM planner’s opinion as an expert witness because they did not apply the test of visual impact in Big Pond as they did in a similar case.

In the second post, The Big Pond RV Park and SHALL as in :You shall not pass!, I wrote about how the CBRM planner presented Council with a description of the key policy in this case that was wrong in fundamental ways.

On to the CBRM planning department and its magic schoolbus.

Remember how Ms. Frizzle would take her students on awesome field trips where they would do things like zoom into space or shrink themselves and fly around in a model plane?

No? Well, it was a inventive show. 

The CBRM planner’s report reminds me of The Magic Schoolbus because the report travels via the magic of the Internet machine to so many cool places.

I created a word cloud in the shape of a whale so that you too can see all of the places that CBRM planning included in their report of whether a spot zone should be created in Big Pond for a RV park.

The UARB was probably doing homework and not watching The Magic School Bus as children and so had this to say about the CBRM planning’s virtual romp through campgrounds far and wide: “…the reliance on requirements for other campgrounds, including those across Canada, without investigating the planning policy context for such sites (if any), ignores the specific policy direction in this matter, i.e., whether there is reasonable protection for residential properties in proximity with respect to adverse affects from the development. ”

Right?

Imagine that you had to figure out if people who live in a space next to the site of a proposed RV park would be protected from the noise and visual impact of that park: Would you look up other campgrounds and report that, for example, in St. Andrews, New Brunswick,  that the minimum site size is 1 acre? Or that in Mississippi Mills, Ontario, a campground can have no more than 100 sites?

The CBRM has a clearly stated policy - policy 17e of the municipal planning strategy - that presents planning and Council with the criteria that must be met if an RV park is to be built in the CBRM. If Planning had researched other campgrounds that had to comply with this exact policy, the research could have been useful. 

But this is not the case. 

The fact that CBRM Planning did not visit the homes that the UARB identified as being totally vulnerable to the visual impact and noise that this Big Pond RV Park would bring further indicts the work they did in analyzing this development project. 

Council should ask Planning about the problematic approach they took to the case of the Big Pond RV Park. We all make mistakes, and it would be healthy if Council would review the UARB ruling so as to learn from its analyses of how the Big Pond RV Park does not fit the intention of the CBRM planning strategy.