Words are but wind that do from men proceed;
None but Chamelions on bare Air can feed;
Great men large hopeful promises may utter;
But words did never Fish or Parsnips butter.
John Taylor, the Water Poet, Epigrammes vvritten on purpose to be read (London, 1651)
Autumn on the Council calendar. The last meetings before the election on 17 October, the draft official community plan back on the table, and a lot of paper moving very fast. This is a quick account of where things have got to since the Committee of the Whole on 21 September, and why I wrote to Council again.
Both letters are in the agenda for today’s meeting: one on the resolution itself, starting at page 40, and one on households outside the municipal water systems, starting at page 55. They sit under item 4.11, the ratification of the Committee of the Whole resolution. That item is on the consent agenda, which means it passes in a single vote with everything else unless a councillor asks for it to be pulled. For background, dates and documents, there is now an explainer on the draft OCP.
what happened to what people said
In May and June the island was asked what it thought of the draft plan. People answered: emails, letters, events, 499 surveys and around four thousand written comments. By September, what came back was a consultant’s memo and a spreadsheet.
The memo, in the 21 September package, lists what the seventeen emails asked for, including six saying the draft “does not offer enough environmental protections, or water source protections”. Then it closes the matter: “No further changes are recommended as a result of the email submissions given high levels of public support attained through the online survey and at in-person events.”
So what people wrote was set aside because of how people ticked boxes. And the boxes were not about the things they wrote. The survey asked 21 agree-or-disagree questions and not one about where anyone’s water comes from. People raised it anyway. I counted: 111 of the open comments raise water supply without being asked, 107 of them worried or asking for more protection, and not one says supply is fine.
the steering committee, and what became of its work
The Steering Committee is the volunteers who have been at this for two years. It met on 10 September to go through the spreadsheet. Staff said there were “60 something” changes on it and no time to go through them individually, and offered to pick out the ones worth discussing. The Chair agreed. By my count, 41 of the 66 rows were never raised in the room.
The Committee then voted unanimously to recommend that Council accept “the amendments agreed upon” and move to a bylaw. That recommendation is quoted in the staff report for 21 September. At the meeting itself it never reached the table. The resolution that passed does not say whether the Committee’s amendments go into the next draft. When the Committee’s council liaison asked, the answer was that the resolution “doesn’t say what’s to be in the revised”.
One councillor, explaining why the Committee’s work could not simply be carried over, described the spreadsheet as “seven or eight pages of small type”. Everyone in that room, councillors included, would have been better served by a draft in front of them.
the resolution
What did pass was long, and it arrived at the end of the discussion. A councillor said she thought she was on the speakers list. The Mayor’s reply: “Okay, well, actually, I’m going to make a motion just because I can, by nature of process.” What followed was three minutes of him reading aloud a motion nobody else in the room had seen. It was not in the agenda or the staff report, which recommended something quite different. It had five clauses with sub-clauses, two sections of the Local Government Act, indicators, concordances, schedules, a conformity program, and a report back by 30 November with “the revised draft or a progress report”.
It carried unanimously. What happened between the reading and the vote, when Council’s liaison to the Steering Committee asked for time to read it, is worth watching for yourself, from 2:10 in the Municipality’s recording.
Councillors were told on 21 September that the resolution would come to the next regular meeting, and could be amended there. That meeting is today, and the resolution is on the consent agenda. A consent agenda is a list of items dealt with together, in a single vote. In the agenda’s own words, Council “may adopt in one motion all recommendations appearing on the Consent Agenda, or prior to the vote, request an item be removed from the Consent Agenda for debate or discussion” (agenda, page 2). Today’s consent agenda also carries the minutes of the last meeting and two bylaws for final adoption. So the chance to amend it exists today only if a councillor asks, before the vote, for the item to be pulled.
and now we are to be educated
Clause 4 is the one that stopped me. It directs a “public education and engagement program” on “what an OCP designation does and does not do”, to be delivered “before the public hearing”. A public hearing comes after first reading, when the text is settled.
And people did not ask to be taught how planning works. They asked to be heard on the things that mattered most to them, for changes and drafting choices to be explained, for more time, and to see the plan as it now stands.
What is needed is not complicated. A clear draft, published, showing every change and why it was made. Then an open public discussion of it, held while the plan can still change, that treats the public as people who can read a plan. A progress report, which could be anything, is not that. Nor is schooling.
where’s the water
Water appears in the resolution twice, as “watershed and water service area”, used as units for indicators. Groundwater does not appear. Aquifers do not appear. Private wells do not appear. Most of this island drinks from aquifers, and aquifers follow neither watersheds nor the boundaries of the Municipality’s water systems.
I have written about this before, to the Committee of the Whole on 18 September, and again in the second letter. Those households have never had anyone at the table, and they still do not.
who pays
The second letter is about money, because that is where the water question lands for about half the island. When a municipal system fails, the cost is shared. When Eagle Cliff needed fixing, the answer was a new main to the Cove Bay system, paid for with a grant of about $1.5 million and $820,000 of borrowing, spread across a service area and years of repayment (BIM’s project page). That is what a municipality is for.
When a private well fails, one household pays, in order, and alone: trucked water, a tank and a pump, attempts to rescue the old well, then a new one. Published 2026 rates put a new residential well at roughly $15,000 to $31,000 before the pump system. On Bowen that is a floor, because the rig comes by ferry and drilling is charged by the foot whether or not water is found. Then comes the water system itself, the storage, pumping and treatment, which a delegation to a municipal committee in 2021 put at about $50,000. So a household can be looking for $50,000 and more, at short notice, in the middle of a dry summer, from behind the sofa cushions.
And it cannot borrow its way out. Lenders treat water as a condition of the security, so the money is needed at exactly the moment the house stops being good security for it. There is no municipal or provincial programme for this, and the draft plan makes no provision for it.
Strip away the speeches and spectacle about frameworks and indicators and it comes down to something very simple. Civilised people, and a civilised polity, do not build a screen of paper and maybes between themselves and neighbours with no water.
the frameworks
One more clause is worth reading slowly. Clause 3.2 asks the revised plan to make its three guiding frameworks “operative”. The frameworks are the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the circular economy. The clause asks for a concordance matching the plan’s objectives to SDG targets, UNDRIP articles and circular-economy principles, a short set of indicators, and a test for any future amendment. Then comes the last phrase: the concordance and indicators are to be “companion documents adopted by Council resolution”.
That puts them outside the plan. An official community plan has force because the Local Government Act says everything Council does afterwards must be consistent with it (s. 478 (2)). That reaches the plan adopted by bylaw. It does not reach a document adopted by resolution. Such a document needs no public hearing, never goes to the Islands Trust for approval, and can be changed at any meeting by a simple vote. So the frameworks are to be made operative in documents that do not bind.
Done honestly, the concordance could still tell us something. SDG target 6.6 names aquifers in its own text. A table matching the plan’s water objectives to that target will have to show whether the plan has any objective for aquifers at all.
what the survey actually said
This is the bit that gets lost. When the public was asked about firm rules, it said yes, louder than to anything else. The three strongest results in the whole survey were:
- limiting development in sensitive ecosystems, at 89.5% agreement
- a wildfire development permit area that “would require” fire prevention measures, at 87.2%
- a water conservation development permit area that “would require new developments to collect and store rainwater”, at 86.5%
The weakest were pay parking, consolidating land use designations, and townhouses. People were not asking for softer words. They were asking for the plan to mean something.
lawyers
Which brings me to the thing I most want to say. When residents asked for firmer wording, the answer came back to legal advice. The memo declines the Conservancy’s request to say “prevent” rather than “discourage” for wetlands and recharge areas, because that “represents mandatory language that is at odds with legal advice”. Nobody has said what the advice is, who gave it, or what question they were asked. The memo’s own Statement of Limitations says it “is not a legal representation or interpretation of laws”.
But any plan worth having will contain things someone could challenge. That is not a flaw; it is what it means to commit to something. If legal caution alone decided what went in, Bowen would end up with a plan that commits to nothing, and nobody could ever be held to a thing.
Deciding what a community is committed to means deciding what it is willing to stand behind. What in the plan could be challenged, how likely that is, and what that risk means for Council and for the public are real questions. But they are political questions. They belong to Council and the public, weighed openly, with the advice on the table. They should not be settled quietly in a memo, with the answer showing up only as a weaker verb.
The leaves are coming down. The plan comes back by the end of November, in some form. I will keep following it.