By G.E. Mortimer, Goldstream Gazette, 2 May 2007
Ben worked with residents in the Langford Lakes Area Protective Association in a campaign against urban sprawl and the Bear Mountain Interchange. This drawing, "Highway to Hell," is by Highlands resident Krista Roessing
“Triangle Mountain is covered with houses. Do you want Skirt Mountain to end up like that?”
Ben Isitt asked the question at a meeting of Langford Lakes Area Protective Association (LLAPS) a week ago today. It is a good question.
Langford voters have never been offered a chance to say yes or no in a referendum to the building of houses, condominiums and golf courses on the forested Skirt Mountain heights that the developers re-named Bear Mountain.
Arguably Langford voters (the 22.3 per cent of them who turned out) gave a negative part-answer when they refused by referendum to let Langford borrow $750,000 to finance a skating rink on Skirt/ Bear Mountain.
It’s anybody’s guess what they would have said to the development itself, if the megaproject had been put to a vote.
Now Bear Mountain is an accomplished fact. According to its advocates, it is a huge benefit to the regional economy, and it more than pays its own way for the costs it imposes.
According to its harshest critics, it is an invader of green space, a promoter of sprawl, a burden on water and transportation services.
Ben Isitt did not say unkind things. He is a historian by trade. His day job is to rummage in documents and living memory, put the facts together as well as he can from the current viewpoint, and advise students about history.
He is also a mobilizer of public opinion. He spoke as a member of the Coalition to Protect Goldstream Watershed.
He was polite and diplomatic. But he pointed out an urgent fact. There still are decisions to make about Bear Mountain.
The developers plan to enlarge the project. There could be houses on terraces, most of the way down to the highway. Developers want to fell more trees and pave over more green space to build an enormous road interchange.
People in the Langford-Florence Lake neighbourhoods would live in its shadow. They would hear and smell its traffic.
“Who will the Bear Mountain interchange serve?” Ben Isitt asked. “Is it for the people who live here, or is it for people who haven’t even moved here?”
A Bear Mountain interchange could be more than an access road for present-day residents and visitors.
The interchange could enable the Bear Mountain project to double its size.
After Ben Isitt and his colleagues had left the meeting, a remarkable thing happened. Developer Les Bjola, a kingpin of the Bear Mountain project, who had been sitting quietly at the back of the room, broke silence and said the speech had been riddled with inaccuracies.
So many errors that a scribe recording it should take care, because part of the Isitt talk might be defamatory.
He hadn’t spoken up earlier, because he didn’t want to turn the meeting into a verbal brawl.
The part he mentioned was the narrative of the changes in designated land use. This struck me as too chilling and complicated to sort out by anything less than a full Royal Commission on land- use policy.
So I am mostly keeping quiet about it here. A tract of forest reserve land, at a key point for a Bear Mountain access road, was opened for real-estate development. Provincially-owned land, which could have been added to Goldstream Park, became part of the Bear Mountain estate. And so on.
Big money tells the story. “When marketing (of Bear Mountain condominiums) began in earnest last October,” David Parker reported in the April 2004 edition of Streetwise, the Calgary real estate newsletter, “$40 million worth of quarter-share units were sold in less than five hours.”
That kind of money, multiplied several times over and translated into jobs and profits, tells us why a discouraging word about Bear Mountain has seldom been heard at Langford City Hall.
Money is important, but quality of life is important too. The interchange can be stopped. The province can refuse to contribute. The Provincial Capital Commission can refuse to make its land available.
A new transportation strategy can be invented. Bear Mountain could have a frequent community-bus service, connecting with commuter rail.
So far, B.C. Transit has refused requests for Bear Mountain buses, but the transit commission might change its mind if senior governments undergo a brain transplant and allow adequate financing, and if Langford applies enough heat.
Langford and partners could invest in a pilot commuter-rail project on the E&N, and thereby reduce car-dependence, switch development from “greenfields” to “brownfields,” and begin a strategy of increasing mixed-use density in Langford’s downtown planning zone, and retrofitting transit in Langford’s sprawl zone. That could whittle down the demand for a Bear Mountain road interchange.
Cancellation of the interchange will have its bright side for developers and residents. If we put a lid on growth, the remaining property will be more valuable.
And we can make Bear Mountain an exclusive Calgary suburb, mostly inhabited by plain Calgary millionaire folks, a kind of Cowtown-on- the-Mountain. We can shut out those Edmonton interlopers with their fancy Alberta capital-region ideas.
