Vancouver city council has torpedoed an ambitious 30-year plan meant to revitalize the West End waterfront while buttressing it against climate change.
The Vancouver Park Board approved the West End Waterfront Plan in April.
The document envisioned new facilities including washrooms, concessions and an amphitheatre at Sunset Beach. It also included climate adaptation measures including raising the beach by one metre in anticipation of rising sea levels and adding habitat islands and removing sections of seawall to protect against storm damage.
But when the plan went to council this week, the city’s ABC majority balked at the price tag.
“Now is not the plan for a $300-million, a third of a billion-dollar, wishlist at a time when we have crumbling infrastructure in the West End particularly that requires repair and upgrades,” said Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung.
Kirby-Yung said residents were more interested in things like repairs to the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, a new community centre, and improved park bathrooms than what she called a “fairytale plan.”
Council sent the plan back to staff, directing them to come back with a more limited proposal focused specifically on foreshore protection.
Park Board Commissioner Laura Christensen called the rejection a slap in the face to staff, stakeholders and members of the public who spent years developing the plan.
“This is a huge waste of taxpayer money to spend three years of work to just shelve the plan and then ask staff to come back and provide another report, is not a good use of taxpayer money,” she said.
Just seven months ago, council’s ABC majority appeared to have a dramatically different view of the proposal.
In November, Kirby-Yung’s colleague, Coun. Peter Meiszner described the plan as “very exciting,” adding that while the concept was expensive it would be funded over multiple capital plans in the decades to come.
“It’s not so much a redevelopment as an enhancement of what we already have. So it’s a really amazing public space, we have beautiful beaches, public parks, this is about making them better,” he told Global News.
That, however, was before Mayor Ken Sim announced plans in December to disband the city’s park board, kicking off an at-times fractious political battle that saw Christensen and two other ABC boardmates split with their ABC council colleagues.
Sim has described the park board as “broken,” and has won the province’s support to fold parks administration under the authority of city council.
The one element of the waterfront plan that did win council approval this week involves restoring two-way vehicle access to a stretch of Beach Avenue west of Denman Street.
The street has been restricted to one-way traffic since a lane was reallocated for cyclists during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the prospect of returning it to vehicle use has already become a hot-button issue.
The new plan will see the road reopened to traffic in both ways, with plans to replace the beachside sidewalk with a new bike path and the installation of a new pedestrian path through the park.
Unsurprisingly, it’s also a plan that has divided council and some on the park board.
“We had a lot of concerns about adding an additional lane of traffic and how that is going to impact Stanley Park, we have a lot of concerns it is just going to increase car traffic and rat-running through the park,” Christensen said.
“This was about balance,” responded Kirby-Yung. “So it supports pedestrians, it supports cyclists and it supports traffic flow in the area.”
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