Canmore’s Municipal Development Plan will be rewritten this year, but it won’t happen alongside the planning process for Three Sisters Mountain Village.
Alaric Fish, manager of planning for the Town of Canmore, told council work on the MDP will move forward by staff in his department and it will be done separately of Area Structure Plan work expected for TSMV to move forward in the future.
“We have had preliminary discussions with the new owners and the intent is this process will proceed somewhat separate from those visions for that land as it is created,” Fish said. “As plans for those lands are figured out by the owners and the community, perhaps we will incorporate them into the MDP at that time.
“If we have a new one it will be amended – if it isn’t complete, it will be incorporated into the draft.”
The current MDP was written in 1998 and Fish said it is long overdue for an update. However, the Town attempted to pass a new plan – dubbed the Community Sustianbility Plan – in 2010 before council rescinded it after second reading.
With the work from that process still relevant, as a large amount of community consultation occurred to draft the CSP, Fish said the new MDP process doesn’t have to start at square one this time.
“We are proposing to largely build on the 2007 to 2009 work,” he said. “It is important to honour that input. There was a lot of time and effort invested by the community in the document and to not use that would be a mistake.”
Fish added the rate of change in the community since 2009 has been moderate and the information gained through extensive public consultation will still be relevant.
The new MDP process, however, will still involve community consultations, including meeting with interest groups and significant landowners. Once a draft MDP is reached, council will have a workshop on it to determine if it is offside or onside of local elected officials’ views on issues.
“Again, we will incorporate that and bring it all together for a community testing of the MDP, then we will go out with that,” Fish said. “The idea is rather than give the community a big heavy document to potentially be critical of, instead we will focus the document in a number of key areas.”
