By Steve Hubrecht
The Village of Radium Hot Springs is gearing up this spring for another round of public consultation on its Official Community Plan (OCP) update.
Refreshing Radium’s OCP is one of the biggest projects underway at the village, and has been going on for a year. Last fall consultants Bluerock Planning presented a preliminary draft of what the OCP update may contain.
The draft was sweeping in scope, covering a wide range of issues, and assessing both the opportunities and challenges the village faces, such as short-term rentals (STRs); where and how future growth should happen; and the housing situation. It proposes eight “big moves” for Radium: growing and strengthening the downtown; more actively managing STRs; revitalizing the Highway 93 strip (between Sinclair Canyon and downtown); creating flexible business areas; protecting ecological areas from development; promoting housing infill; creating comprehensive planning areas; and improving community connection through parks and trails.
“It’s a big document because it is a big change,” Radium mayor Mike Gray told?the Pioneer when the draft came out. “This is the first time Radium has dove this deeply into the OCP since the village’s foundation (in 1990).”
The village undertook public consultation on the draft OCP this past winter, but wants even more feedback. To that end, it will launch a survey and will hold two open houses, one in-person and one virtually through Zoom in mid-April.
“The idea is to get together with the public, and to get feedback from them,” Gray said. “We’re at a point now where we’ve gathered a lot of feedback already, but we want to make sure we do as much as we can.”
How much more consultation will there be until the draft OCP is finalized and actually becomes the new OCP?
“That really depends on what kind of feedback we get,” explained Gray. “If it’s mostly small issues and concerns that are arising, we’ll do some edits and move forward. But if the feedback we hear is telling us there is, for instance, five major issues that we’ve got totally wrong (in the draft OCP) and some new issues we completely missed, well, then we’ve got a lot more work to do.”
Gray said the feedback Radium councillors have heard so far indicates people “feel that we are generally on the right track, and that it’s mostly finer details that need to be sorted out.”
The survey will launch on Monday, April 14, and will be available both online and in hard copy. The in-person open house will be Tuesday, April 15 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the Radium Hot Springs Centre (presentation at 6 p.m.). The virtual open house is on Wednesday, April 16 by Zoom at 7 p.m. You need to pre-register to get the link to the virtual open house.
Radium councillors wanted to do both a virtual and in-person open house because “we do have a lot of property owners in Radium who are not full-time residents and can’t always make it to in-person events,” said Gray.
To find out more visit radiumhotsprings.ca/ourpathforward/.
