Sarah Starkweather

In my professional life, as a sustainable building certification reviewer, I help to advance improvements in building design that reduce resource use and greenhouse gas emissions. In my personal life, I have been car-free or car-lite for my entire adult life, and my primary advocacy has been around this. I am part of the local cycling community: I'm a founding member of the Clover Point Picnic Club, which promotes sustainable transportation choices and family cycling; I participate in critical mass rides and Capital Bike events (as a rider and marshal), and volunteer for various bike counts; and I write letters to the editor and Council in support of building a well-designed active transportation network (as well as other forms of civic participation: workshops, surveys etc.).

More broadly, I speak out and vote and donate based on my principles, which include the belief that we should be prioritizing immediate, ongoing actions to slow climate change and protect our environment: by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by improving our built landscape to protect from extreme weather events, by preserving and restoring our native ecosystems, and by making good development decisions.

- Continuing to protect and expand our tree canopy using existing tools (urban forest management plan, tree protection bylaw), while also refining them and creating new ones (codifying developer incentives for tree retention, strengthening tree replacement requirements, identifying more locations for planting on municipal land, etc.).
- Revising boulevard planting and maintenance guidelines to discourage monoculture turf grass and encourage planting of native species, and auditing municipal lands to find opportunities to do the same.
- Supporting continued restoration of Bowker Creek.
- Codifying approaches to requiring or incentivizing proven stormwater management design features in all redevelopment.
- Improving road safety for pedestrians and cyclists to make these modes more appealing and reduce the total number of automobile trips.
- Promoting a natural design approach when developing shoreline inundation protections at McNeill Bay and elsewhere.
- Supporting engagement with Coolkit strategies by neighbours in additional locations, and exploring possibilities for expansion (e.g. recruiting champions through workshops offered by the Parks and Recreation system, interfacing with Oak Bay High students, etc.).
- Reporting out--by public-facing means other than municipal reports--on how Council decisions impact our environmental and climate action goals, and on our measurable progress in terms of GHG reduction, urban canopy expansion, habitat restoration, etc.

To be clear: I cannot promise to "ensure" anything as one member of Council, but here is what I would propose and work for.

In brief: I think we need to prioritize codifying specific requirements rather than expressing general lofty principles without giving them teeth. This means creating new bylaws for environmental protection as well as strengthening the OCP to include more specific goals and metrics.

Some ways of doing this:
- Quickly follow through on the promise in the OCP to write and pass a stormwater management bylaw. This bylaw should state specific stormwater management requirements for all developments, and offer incentives (such as density bonuses or fee reductions) for going above and beyond these requirements.
- Apply a development permit area to a specific zone around Bowker Creek, where more stringent stormwater runoff measures are required.
- Revise the tree protection bylaw to be more specific about the types of trees that are protected, the types of trees that should be planted, and the metrics for replacement. (For example, one-to-one replacement might not always be sufficient if the species is different.)
- Create a program offering height bonuses for new developments that are designed with less total lot coverage.
- Add more specific language to the OCP to create measurable goals for planting more native species and naturalizing public lands (based on naturalized area as a percent of public lands).
- Using the OCP to more clearly identify less sensitive areas where we want to direct redevelopment.

The $70,000 grant was awarded specifically for the creation of a Community Climate Action Plan; it is notable that many of the other BC municipalities who received this federal funding proposed actual climate action projects. I think it is unfortunate that Oak Bay is using the money for "assessing local climate hazards and identifying practical solutions" when, in fact, we have already identified hazards and many of practical solutions we can take. As much as I appreciate a good action plan, Oak Bay could stand to spend less time and money on plans and more on action.

So, how would I support allocating these funds? If I could go back in time I'd advocate for applying for funds for one or more practical actions, rather than paying a consultant to write a plan: we could use funds for speeding up our tree-planting efforts; installing bump-outs with native plantings and street trees; electrifying our municipal fleet; commissioning and retrofitting our municipal buildings; revising our OCP and municipal bylaws to ensure that development protects the tree canopy and provides stormwater mitigation ... Any of these would be better than yet another planning exercise.

Given our current reality: I would advocate for developing action plan on the shortest possible timeline. That plan must focus on establishing quantitative measures and clear metrics, provide a commitment to regular reporting on progress, and be paired with the adoption of new bylaws and updates to the OCP that directly support key principles and goals.