Bowen Island council approved an official business plan that was presented by planning consultant Tom Fletcher at the council meeting on March 25. The 2013 Strategic Business Plan does not contain decisions on issues before council but is a listing of goals that council and staff will work on. It comes after council and municipal staff held a strategic planning workshop with what the municipality called "a view to creating a strategic business plan for the municipality" last month.
Councillor Cro Lucas notes that the plan has given council and staff a "step by step process" on the goals they are looking to move forward on. "Everything that is being proposed in the plan has to go through the public input process before it finally becomes an action plan," Lucas told the Undercurrent.
The municipality enlisted Fletcher of Fletcher and Company Municipal Consulting in March of 2012 to help with planning and Fletcher took the goals and priorities from the February workshop and assembled the 2013 Strategic Business Plan, approved on the 25th.
Some areas the plan details movement on are: Snug Cove improvement, including ferry marshalling and parking issues, acquiring the strip of land on the north side of Government Road, updating by-law enforcement, cleaning up Mannion (Deep) Bay, updating Bowen's Emergency Plan and detailing economic strategies.
Creating a "community campus" with the intention of building a community centre that could include a municipal hall, a cultural centre, the library, museum and medical practitioners' offices is also noted in the plan. The finding and allocating of funds for that project and the others are also areas mentioned as priorities.
The plan states that it has to be reviewed each year in advance of the budgeting process because "circumstances change financial issues arise or may be resolved, legislation changes, infrastructure needs may arise that are not anticipated that distort priorities, grants may become available and so on."
The strategic plan can be viewed at the municipality's website (http://www.bimbc.ca) and concludes by stating the plan is a "work in progress" and that the "priorities...are the ones that staff will concentrate on" during the year. Lucas adds that "there is much to do and time is short" but the municipality has "a full complement of staff working well together as a team under the very capable leadership of a [chief administrative officer] who knows this island and its eccentricities."
