The District of Lake Country recently received notice that their Local Government Development Approvals Program grant application to the BC Ministry of Housing, administered by the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM), was successful; and $145,000 is being allocated to improve internal processes for development approvals.
“One of Lake Country Council’s key priorities for this year is to improve the development processes across the board so any property owner can move forward on development opportunities," said Mayor Blair Ireland. “We’ve had some recent help from the City of Kelowna to make faster progress on getting through the backlog of applications. A long-term sustainable solution to simplifying the processes and streamline approvals is what we are aiming for now.”
With the Province’s emphasis on accelerating housing, Lake Country staff are currently working to identify the procedural, bylaw and policy inefficiencies in the development approval process to better understand the issues that complicate, delay and frustrate the existing development approval process. The grant funding will assist in that detailed review and assessment, which includes closely looking at the application processing flow through various staff, public and political thresholds that affect the processing timeline and approvals.
“Our goal is to expand the community-wide general conditions to be more enabling versus restrictive,” said Lake Country Chief Administrative Officer, Paul Gipps. “The review and assessment work now will guide the scope of future OCP review and updates to develop enabling and permissive OCP policy versus restrictive. We need to look at removing policy inefficiencies and expand opportunities for delegation of authority to find the balance between process improvements and development timelines.”
The Local Government Development Approvals Program grant funding is one of the steps the Province is taking to tackle the housing crisis and work to deliver affordable homes for people in BC.
For more information contact:
communications@lakecountry.bc.ca
Tel 250-766-5650