This summer I wrote a lot of submissions, and made seven freedom of information requests to six different bodies. The requests are a story of their own, for another time.
Most of the submissions are long and detailed, because the questions they deal with are complex. This post is not a summary of them. The point here is simply to get them all up, in one place, with links, in date order.
Not everything I sent this summer is here. Some of it was about process: how correspondence is handled, what reaches an agenda and what does not, how the rules are applied. If you live on Bowen you may have seen some of those in agenda packages too. Process is a thread of its own, and I will come back to it.
If you want to go straight to the documents, the index at the end lists them all, with a note on what each one covers. Read them or don’t; that is up to you. I will come back to what is in them and break it out piece by piece. But even if I never do, it is on the public record now. Some of what is there:
- Cider-making wastewater is a serious pollutant. It is many times stronger than household sewage, heavy with organic matter that strips the oxygen out of any water it reaches, and it comes in surges at harvest.
- This is not news to anyone who deals with it. Metro Vancouver has a bylaw written specifically for fermentation waste, and the Capital Regional District regulates it too. Washington, California and Oregon regulate winery wastewater discharged to land. Vermont and New York regulate it as high-strength waste. Insurers treat it as a separate risk.
- The Municipality knows it too. Its own engineering studies, in 2017 and again in 2020, found fermentation waste from the village distillery to be a different and far stronger kind of waste than household sewage. The planner who dealt with the distillery in 2017 is the one now handling the cidery. No one has assessed the cidery’s wastewater.
- The ground around the cidery is sensitive. It is a recharge area in a watershed protection zone, with dozens of wells drawing on the same fractured rock.
If you live on Bowen you may have seen some of these submissions already in agenda packages. If you don’t, the sections below give some background, enough to frame what follows.
The place. Bowen Island is in Howe Sound, a short ferry ride from West Vancouver in British Columbia. About 4,300 people live there. Since 1999 it has been its own municipality, Bowen Island Municipality, with a mayor and council. It is the only island municipality in BC. That is a formal designation, and it means Bowen sits inside the Islands Trust area while governing itself.
Bowen looks simple. It is usually seen, talked about and planned for as a quaint small island: a ferry, a village, a few thousand people. Across BC the islands carry a particular image, easy-going, green, a bit granola, places where people live gently on the land. Tourism adds to the pressure that image hides. Visitors drink, wash and flush, on water that has to come from the island, and residents know what it costs them.
In the Municipality’s own survey for the new Official Community Plan last year, asked what the biggest issues were, without anything being named, nearly one answer in four raised the ferry. “Residents avoid the cove in the summer and spend hours commuting,” one wrote. And tourism does more than add people. It sells the image and depends on it, and in selling it, fixes it further in place.
The more the island is marketed as simple, the harder it is to see the complicated place underneath. The cidery at 620 Laura Road, which this post is about, sells that story too. Its rezoning application invites visitors to walk the rows of trees, “literally tasting the land through the cider”.
The land you are tasting, by the cidery’s own account, is mostly in the Similkameen Valley. The land on Bowen is where the wastewater goes.
In terms of geography, jurisdiction and water, Bowen is anything but simple. I will come back to each of these, but in brief:
- It is not quite a Gulf Island. It is a Howe Sound island. The southern Gulf Islands are mostly low and sedimentary. Bowen is steep, and its rock is fractured and crystalline. That changes how water runs off, where it is stored, and how wells behave. It is settled like a Gulf Island but built like a Howe Sound one, so it has no true comparator.
- It sits in bodies built for somewhere else. Bowen is part of Metro Vancouver, the regional district that covers the city, and it is the only inhabited island that is a full member. But it sits outside Metro Vancouver’s water and sewerage systems, and cannot be part of them. Its health authority is Vancouver Coastal Health, which is mostly urban and mainland. The Gulf Islands are served by Island Health, which works with island water systems every day. Bowen’s nearest island neighbours, Gambier and Keats, are in a different regional district again.
- People live in its watersheds. Metro Vancouver’s drinking water comes from three large watersheds closed to the public for close to a century, where nobody lives. On Bowen, people live inside the watersheds that supply their water, and every drop used comes from the island.
So Bowen carries the planning expectations of a region of millions, with none of the region’s water behind it, and under instruments designed for other kinds of places.
The Islands Trust. In the late 1960s the islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland were under heavy pressure from subdivision. In 1970 the Province froze subdivision on the islands at ten acres. In 1973 a committee of the Legislature found that a shortage of drinking water was a major concern on nearly all of them. The Islands Trust Act followed in 1974. It created the Islands Trust, with the job to “preserve and protect” the islands and their environment. From 1977 the Trust also had land use planning powers.
So from the start, land use on these islands and water were tied together. How many homes, and what uses, a place could take depended on its water. Bowen’s 1981 plan was built on that: the limits on density were, in effect, the protection for the water.
The worries that created the Trust are Bowen’s present. The pressure then came from the cities, and of all the Trust islands, Bowen is the closest to the largest urban centre in the province, and the only one inside the metropolitan region producing that pressure.
Around 1980 about 800 to 900 people lived on Bowen. In 2021 it was 4,256, roughly five times as many. And the pace has not slowed. Between 2016 and 2021 Bowen grew by 15.7%. Metro Vancouver grew by 7.3%, and the City of Vancouver by under 5%. The island grew twice as fast as the region around it, and three times as fast as the city. It is now the most densely populated island in the Islands Trust area, and the one where the most homes are lived in all year: 85%, against 60% or less on about half the others.
The people changed as well as the numbers. Between 2011 and 2016 about 950 people moved to Bowen and about 670 left, so the island turned over far faster than it grew. Between 2020 and 2025 the benchmark home price on Bowen rose by about half, one of the two fastest rises anywhere in the Greater Vancouver area, and at the start of 2025 it had the highest one-year rise of any area the region’s realtors report on.
Incorporation in 1999 brought a municipality with its own professional staff, and a new kind of local politics to go with it.
Growth and change on that scale, in that time, puts pressure on everything, and on water most of all.
And more is required. Under provincial housing legislation passed in 2023, the Municipality produced an interim Housing Needs Report in November 2024. It says Bowen will need 1,393 more homes over the next twenty years. In 2021 the island had 1,720 households, so that is an increase of about eighty per cent. The same legislation requires the Official Community Plan and zoning to make room for that number.
Too many people on too little water was the fear all the way back to the late ’60s. On Bowen that is not history. It is the situation now.
Bowen plans for itself, through its own council, but the Trust still has a role. It is set out in the Letters Patent that created the Municipality in 1999, and their purpose is stated plainly: “to ensure that there shall be no conflict between the actions of the municipality and the object of the Islands Trust and the trust policy statement.”
There are two routes. Changes to the Official Community Plan need the Trust’s approval. They go to its Executive Committee twice: for comment before the public hearing, and for approval before the Municipality can adopt them. Other bylaws, such as a rezoning, need no approval. They go to the Trust only if they have “any reference to a matter included in the trust policy statement”, and then only for comment, before third reading. The Trust’s Executive Committee has 45 days to say whether it objects. If it advises that the bylaw may be contrary to the Policy Statement, the Municipality must tell the provincial minister responsible for municipalities, now the Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs, who can give direction or require the two to settle it. Otherwise the Municipality carries on. For a rezoning, that referral is the only review by anyone outside Bowen, and it starts from a checklist filled in by the Municipality’s own staff.
The water. In the Municipality’s own words, “Bowen Island’s water comes from rainfall collected in the aquifers and water sheds.” The Municipality runs seven water systems, several of them on groundwater. There is one large private system and many small ones. Many households are on their own wells, and nobody counts how many.
Because the water sits in the cracks of the rock, not in a layer, a new well may find little or nothing, and you pay for every foot drilled either way.
The signs are not good. This summer all seven municipal systems went to stage 3 water restrictions, and they were still there on 18 September. None of this is new. The Municipality’s advice to private well owners opens by saying it has received reports of wells running dry. That advice was first published in 2015 (Undercurrent), and it is still on the Municipality’s website today, essentially unchanged (Municipality). In 2018 the Municipality’s public works manager put it plainly: “We’re on an island. The wells dry up and that’s it.” (Undercurrent) In 2019 the Bluewater and King Edward Bay systems, nearly 200 homes, ran short. Water was trucked in, and the interim director of engineering told Council the aquifer under Bluewater was “severely depleted” (CBC, Undercurrent). In 2023 Eagle Cliff, where shortages come every dry season, went to stage 4 (Undercurrent). The new line joining it to the Cove Bay system is the Municipality’s answer to that. The Province’s 2006 classification of the aquifer under the cidery recorded a “downward trend” in water levels in some wells, said this “may need further investigation”, and rated the level of development “heavy”.
And it is not just Bowen. The Provincial Health Officer’s own figures show drinking water advisories in BC rose from 521 in 2014 to 862 in 2024, while the number of water systems rose by 7.6%. On 31 March 2024, 97% of all advisories were on small systems.
Bowen carries more than its share. On one national list of drinking water advisories, as it stood in August 2026, Bowen alone had as many as every other island in the Islands Trust area put together. What that means is a topic for another day.
The Drinking Water Protection Act has required the Provincial Health Officer to report on drinking water every year since it came into force in 2003. For most of that time the reports came years apart, one of them covering five years at once. The first report to cover a single year was published in December 2024. The two annual reports so far each arrived about twenty months after the year they cover, and there is still no report for the year that ended in March 2025. And BC did not license the use of groundwater at all until 2016.
The cidery. 620 Laura Road is a rural residential property with a remarkable heritage apple collection: about 1,200 trees of 900 varieties on a single acre, built over more than two decades from the 1990s by John and Josephine Riley, with the horticulturist André Chollat. It is a collection for keeping old varieties alive, not an orchard for producing fruit. Anne Franc de Ferrière-Chollat set out its history for Council this year. (her May letter)
The current owners bought the property in 2019 and opened the first cidery on Bowen, technically a land-based winery. Cider production is not a permitted use in that zone.
The Province licensed the cidery in October 2020, and it was granted land-based status that November, before the Municipality had given any permission for the use. Council granted a temporary use permit in March 2021 and renewed it in December 2023. Nine days after the renewal, the owners announced they were leaving the island, and the property went up for sale. In 2026 an application was made to rezone it so the cidery can operate permanently. That application is RZ-2026-0014, and the bylaw that would do it is Bylaw No. 726.
The cidery’s own website says its award-winning cider, Sip & Tell, is made from “100% organic McIntosh apples grown in a long-established orchard in BC’s Simillkameen Valley”. In 2025 the owners told the Municipality they lease an orchard in Cawston, in the Similkameen. The definition of a cidery in the bylaw allows exactly this. Only 25% of the fruit has to come from the same lot, “or from another lot which is part of the same business”, and nothing says where that other lot must be.
At every stage, the questions about water and waste were passed to someone else or put off to the next stage. How the cidery came to be, and how it was handled, is a story of its own, and I will come back to it in more detail. But one thing needs saying now. In February 2021 a councillor asked the owners how they would deal with the waste from production. The answer was: “there’s one input… 100% fruit juice… no water, nothing going in.” It is an answer about what goes in, given to a question about what comes out, and it means nothing. A month later, voting to grant the permit, the same councillor repeated it: water is “apparently not used in the production of cider, which was something I certainly didn’t know, and perhaps many of the neighbours didn’t know.” The neighbours knew. We never thought the question was what goes into the tank. It was always what comes out of the cidery, and where it goes. Five years on, the same answer is still being given. At the Advisory Planning Commission this July, a commissioner asked the owner directly: “what happens to the waste from the cidery processing?” He answered: “I think you’re probably asking about fruit,” and finished: “There’s no water that goes into the process.” The Municipality’s planner then told the Commission that the well “provides the wash water used in the commercial operation”, and in the next breath: “water is not an input into cider making.” The wash water is the wastewater. He said it again to Council at first reading. Nobody has said where the wastewater goes.
Why I am involved. Our family lived and farmed on Westside Road from 1989 to 2022. Murray Creek runs through the cidery property, under Westside Road, into the wetland on what was our land, and on from there. We were the immediate neighbours downhill and downstream, and our well was the closest to the cidery. Around it are many more: 13 wells within 300 metres of the cidery, and 86 within a kilometre. Since March 2021 I have been asking, in writing: what does this use do to the water, and has anyone looked?
In five years of Council meetings on this property, the water question has never been taken up seriously.
At the Parks, Environment and Climate Action Advisory Committee (PECAAC) meeting on the rezoning this July, a councillor asked whether there was “any indication” that the neighbours’ wells were being affected. A committee member said the cidery had been operating for years “and nobody’s run out of water”. Another answered: “We don’t know.”
We did run out of water, in the summer of 2021. But the real question is how anyone would know. No one with any responsibility for it measures the wells around the cidery, nobody has asked the people who rely on them, and the Municipality says it does not track well levels. And if your well does fail, that is your problem. Too bad, so sad.
Some parts of the island have somewhere to turn. Along the new line joining the Eagle Cliff and Cove Bay systems, households on private wells are connecting to the municipal supply. For us, and for our neighbours, there was and is no main to connect to. You drill a new well, if the rock gives you one, or you truck in water, and you pay for it yourself.
The councillor’s question also gets things the wrong way round. It asks for proof of harm before anything is done. That is the reverse of the precautionary principle, which is in Bowen’s current Official Community Plan, and the councillor who asked that question chaired the committee that wrote that plan.
Whether a use like this harms water is a complicated question. It is about slow changes in an aquifer and a creek, about many wells drawing on the same rock, and about what the waste does over years. It will not be answered by waiting to see whose well fails.
Much of the support for the cidery has come down to feeling. People who have never met the owners say they are good people. A cidery sounds wholesome and rural. It has a lovely vibe.
Water does not care. It does not care about the vibe, or anyone’s feelings, or their opinions, or what they do not know. It does not give anyone a pass because they buy organic or give to environmental causes. It is there or it is not, clean or not, and what is done to it cannot easily be undone.
What I saw, I reported. In 2021 I sent photographs of pollution in the pond on our land to the provincial water branch. I watched the creek’s flow, and our well, through that summer. I wrote about that summer here at the time, and I told Vancouver Coastal Health. No one did a thing. Instead I was told it was not their job, not their problem, and that perhaps I should try someone else. No one took it on. The records that would show what happened, and whether anyone looked, are what my freedom of information requests are for. So far very little has come back. When it does, I will write about what that shows.
The Official Community Plan. Since 2024 the Municipality has also been rewriting its Official Community Plan. This is the document that sets the long-term policies land use decisions are supposed to follow. It matters more than any single application, because it outlasts them all. Bowen’s last two plans were adopted in 1996 and 2011, and each was in force for about fifteen years. Whatever this one says will be the test every application is measured against for a generation.
And the plan and the cidery are connected. In the current plan, anyone proposing an industrial use has to prove there is enough water and a safe way to deal with the waste, wherever the use is. In the draft, that test applies only to businesses in the Industrial designation. At the same time, “agricultural processing” is being written in as a main use in the rural designations, including the one 620 Laura Road sits in. It is limited only to products produced “primarily” on the lot, and nothing says what “primarily” means. So a use like the cidery could fall outside the water test altogether.
So this summer three things ran side by side: the rezoning at the Municipality, the referral at the Islands Trust, and the OCP rewrite. Here is the sequence. Each of my submissions links to my own copy, with a note of where it appears in the public record.
13 April 2026. The rezoning application came to Council. At that stage it also included a ten-room guest house, and it was submitted by prospective buyers. Vancouver Coastal Health suggested the Municipality could require an assessment by a professional hydrogeologist, and recommended a letter of assurance on the septic system. Staff recommended that both be required, and said the applicant had no concerns with that. Staff also said they would, at that point, recommend not waiving a public hearing.
25 May 2026. A revised application came from the owners, with the guest house removed. Council decided to give notice of first reading under section 467 of the Local Government Act instead of holding a public hearing. The revised staff report did not mention the two reports Vancouver Coastal Health had called for.
15 June. My submission on the rezoning to Mayor and Council (PDF), with a letter to the Deputy Corporate Officer, copied to Council, asking whether Council’s 13 April direction was being followed. (PDF) Published in the 13 July Council agenda package, item 12.2, pages 197 to 225. The submission also appears in the 7 July PECAAC agenda package, item 4.1(a), and in the 8 July Islands Trust Executive Committee agenda package, item 12.2.
19 June. My submission to round two of the OCP engagement (PDF), and a note to Council on the foundations of the OCP review and groundwater. (PDF) The submission was published in the 14 July OCP Steering Committee agenda package, item 6.1, pages 28 to 62. Both were published in the 13 July Council agenda package, item 12.4, pages 229 to 257.
27 June. My letter to the Islands Trust Executive Committee. It asked three things: whether the Committee would now respond to the concern we raised in 2021; whether the Trust holds any records on the vineyard and winery provisions in Bowen’s Land Use Bylaw; and what the Trust’s involvement is in Bowen’s OCP update. (PDF) Published in the 8 July agenda package, item 12.2. The Committee received it for information.
29 June. My submission to PECAAC for its 7 July meeting. It was a covering letter with three documents: my aquifer, groundwater and watershed evidence record, a site plan and site visit note, and a comparison of three related applications. (PDFs: letter, evidence record, site plan note, comparison) Published in the 7 July PECAAC agenda package, item 4.1(a), in the same file as my 15 June submission, under a file name dated 15 June.
7 July. PECAAC considered the application. Among its recommendations was an assessment by a professional hydrogeologist, including cumulative impacts and climate change.
9 July. My letter to Council for the Eagle Cliff and Cove Bay water systems update by Vancouver Coastal Health and the Municipality, on groundwater and private wells. (PDF) Published in the 13 July Council agenda package, item 3.1(a), page 25.
19 July. My second letter to the Executive Committee, putting the same three questions again, numbered. It also set out what the Committee would be reviewing when the rezoning bylaw reached it. (PDF) Published in the 29 July agenda package, item 12.3. The Committee agreed to reply with a thank you and an acknowledgement of receipt.
19 July. My freedom of information request to the Islands Trust, for the records the second of those questions asked about. The Trust has since applied to the Information and Privacy Commissioner for permission to disregard part of it, and that is now at inquiry. I will come back to it.
20 July. My letter to Council asking how Bylaw 726 is consistent with the OCP. (PDF) Published in the 27 July Council agenda package, item 7.2(a), pages 212 to 217, where it is dated 21 July.
23 July. The Advisory Planning Commission considered the application. For it, I sent five documents on 13 July. (PDFs: letter, table, water submission, evidence record, 15 June submission; or all five in one file) The first was a letter setting out that a public hearing can only be waived if the proposal is consistent with the Official Community Plan, that no one had assessed whether it was, and that the Commission’s advice should not be allowed to stand in for that missing finding. The others were a table of the OCP policies cited in every staff report on the property since 2021, a submission on water, aquifers and groundwater, my 29 June aquifer evidence record, and my 15 June submission. Published in the 23 July APC agenda package, item 4.1. The Commission recommended that an assessment of the cidery’s wastewater, cleaning effluent and organic byproducts be required; that the rezoning be deferred until the Grafton Lake Watershed Management Plan is complete; that Council look for a way to preserve the diversity of the heritage orchard; and that Council should still consider holding a public hearing. It said nothing about consistency with the OCP. The APC’s own minutes have not yet been approved. The wording here is taken from the staff report for the 27 July meeting.
24 July. My note to Council for item 7.2. My 15 June submission had been received on 13 July only as an information item, and item 7.2 made no reference to it, so I sent it again, with an index of my submissions to both committees. (PDF) Published in the 27 July Council agenda package, item 7.2(d), pages 342 to 371.
27 July. A further submission to Council for the same item. (PDF) Published in the 27 July Council agenda package, item 7.2(e), pages 372 to 385. That day Council gave Bylaw 726 first reading and referred it to the Islands Trust.
20 August. My submission to the Islands Trust Executive Committee on the referral, with a paper setting each staff comment in the Trust’s checklist against the record. (PDFs: submission, checklist paper) Published in the 26 August agenda package, item 12.4, pages 438 to 648.
24 and 25 August. The Chair of the Executive Committee wrote to acknowledge my letters. I replied that the three questions from June and July were still unanswered. (PDF)
26 August. The Executive Committee resolved that Bylaw 726 may be contrary to, or at variance with, two Islands Trust Policy Statement policies: 4.1.5, on farming, and 5.7.2, on economic opportunity and community character. It also asked for more information on the bylaw’s consistency with policy 4.4.3, on water use.
4 September. My letter to Council setting the draft minutes of the 27 July meeting against the recording, ahead of the vote to adopt them. (PDF) I asked that it be placed before Council with the minutes, at item 4.1. It was published in the 8 September Council agenda package as correspondence, item 12.14, pages 363 to 371.
7 September. My letter to the Executive Committee on three factual matters, ahead of its written response to the Municipality. (PDF)
15 September. My letter to the Committee of the Whole on the draft OCP. (PDF) Published in the 21 September Committee of the Whole agenda package, item 5.1(a).
18 September. My letter to the Committee of the Whole on water in the draft OCP, copied to the Islands Trust Executive Committee. (PDF) Published in the 21 September Committee of the Whole agenda package, item 5.1(c).
Where things stand. The Islands Trust’s written response to the Municipality on Bylaw 726 was due by 12 September. The public has no way to see it, or to know what the Municipality intends to do with it, until it appears in a Council agenda. Bylaw 726 was not on the 8 September agenda. The agenda for the next Regular Council meeting, on 28 September, is due to be published at the end of the day on 21 September. The bylaw, the Trust’s response, or both may appear there, and I will add them here when they do.
The draft OCP goes to Committee of the Whole on 21 September. On the staff recommendation, a bylaw to adopt it would then come back to Council for first reading on 13 October. The municipal election is on 17 October.
Index of submissions
| Date | To | Document | Some of what’s in it | Public record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 June | Council | Rezoning submission | Five years of Vancouver Coastal Health chlorine readings, none meeting the permit standard, ending in the May 2026 water quality advisory. Cidery wastewater as industrial effluent handled under a domestic sewage regulation. The groundwater licence VCH called for in 2021, never obtained. The light-industrial class BC Assessment gives the property. How each body’s reliance on another closes into a circle. | Council 13 July, 12.2 |
| 15 June | Deputy Corporate Officer, copied to Council | Process letter | Whether Council’s 13 April referral was being followed: the committees had not reviewed the application, the application had changed, and the public hearing had been set aside. | Council 13 July, 12.2 |
| 19 June | OCP Steering Committee | Round two submission | Water and private wells in the draft OCP. The weakened water test for light industry. “Agricultural processing” in the rural designations. Temporary use safeguards. The Committee’s own terms of reference. | OCP SC 14 July, 6.1 |
| 19 June | Council | Note on OCP foundations | What the OCP review must settle first on groundwater, and the Islands Trust mandate. | Council 13 July, 12.4 |
| 27 June | Islands Trust Executive Committee | Letter | The 2021 request to reconsider the Trust’s decision on Bylaw 528, answered by no one. The vineyard prohibition removed as “housekeeping”. Three questions. | Trust EC 8 July, 12.2 |
| 29 June | PECAAC | Submission letter | Environmental requirements not met: a streamside protection area, lasting riparian protection, a plan for the wastewater, the Conservation Development Policy. The standard the Committee had already set next door. | PECAAC 7 July, 4.1(a) |
| 29 June | PECAAC | Aquifer, groundwater and watershed evidence record | Sensitive ecosystems mapping, the watershed protection development permit area, the recharge wetland, well density, artesian conditions, and the gaps in the record. | PECAAC 7 July, 4.1(a) |
| 29 June | PECAAC | Site plan note | The creek and the wastewater system missing from the site plan. Assessments recommended in April, then dropped. A site visit. | PECAAC 7 July, 4.1(a) |
| 29 June | PECAAC | Three applications compared | Three rezonings down one creek: what each filed, how each was scrutinised, the covenants on each. | PECAAC 7 July, 4.1(a) |
| 9 July | Council | Letter on Eagle Cliff and Cove Bay | Who the new water connections reach, and the households on private wells left relying on fractured bedrock, with no guarantee of water. | Council 13 July, 3.1(a) |
| 13 July | APC | Procedural letter | A hearing can be waived only if the bylaw is consistent with the OCP, and no one has assessed that. The Commission’s advice should not stand in for the missing finding. | APC 23 July, 4.1 |
| 13 July | APC | OCP policy table | Every staff report on the property since 2021, set against the OCP policies each did and did not cite. | APC 23 July, 4.1 |
| 13 July | APC | Water, aquifer, groundwater and watershed submission | What fermentation wastewater is. The Municipality’s own 2017 and 2020 engineering studies. How Metro Vancouver, the CRD, Washington, California, Oregon, Vermont and New York treat it. The wrong regulatory regime. | APC 23 July, 4.1 |
| 19 July | Islands Trust Executive Committee | Second letter | The same three questions, numbered. The applicants’ reliance on the 2021 vineyard removal. “Agricultural processing” in the draft OCP. The hearing set aside. | Trust EC 29 July, 12.3 |
| 20 July | Council | OCP consistency letter | One question: how is the bylaw consistent with the OCP? The motion that set aside the hearing without the finding the law requires. A schedule driven by the permit’s expiry. | Council 27 July, 7.2(a) |
| 24 July | Council | Note, with the 15 June submission | The 15 June submission sent again, because item 7.2 did not refer to it. An index of the committee submissions. The documents filed under “620 Miller Road”. | Council 27 July, 7.2(d) |
| 27 July | Council | Item 7.2 submission | A reading of the first reading report and Bylaw 726. A cidery definition that applies across the whole bylaw, and figures no one enforces. What the committees were told. Ten errors in the report. The permit as the argument. | Council 27 July, 7.2(e) |
| 20 August | Islands Trust Executive Committee | Submission on the referral | Eight findings, including: the only application of three not required to assess its water; four records marking the ground as sensitive; a pathogen screening of one well standing in for a water assessment; wastewater never characterised, with three inconsistent accounts; no staff report citing an OCP water policy; the checklist, and the report republished after the meeting. | Trust EC 26 August, 12.4 |
| 20 August | Islands Trust Executive Committee | Checklist paper | Each staff comment in the Trust checklist, set against the record. | Trust EC 26 August, 12.4 |
| 25 August | Chair, Islands Trust Executive Committee | Reply | The three questions from June and July, still unanswered. | Not known |
| 4 September | Council | Letter on the draft minutes of 27 July | The draft minutes set against the recording, item by item, including the checklist and the staff report. | Council 8 September, 12.14 |
| 7 September | Islands Trust Executive Committee | Three factual matters | The water licence a finding rested on. The 25% in the cidery definition. Where the definition’s drafting came from. | Expected on a coming agenda |
| 15 September | Committee of the Whole | OCP process letter | Nobody has seen the plan: the attachment is the May draft, not one with the 66 changes. | COW 21 September, 5.1(a) |
| 18 September | Committee of the Whole | Water letter | Stage 3 across all seven systems. Water set aside from the start of the OCP work, and again when the public raised it. Density added where the water is least known. Six things to settle, including groundwater work, where the 1,393 homes will go, and recharge area protection. | COW 21 September, 5.1(c) |