The most important document at Coquitlam City Hall is getting a revamp.
Municipal planners say they’re reviewing the Official Community Plan (OCP), a long-term vision and broad policy direction to guide city planning and land-use management.
And they feel about 65 per cent of the content is redundant while 15 per cent is obsolete, allowing staff to shave the existing OCP to less than 400 pages.
Senior planner Emma Chow told the city’s council in committee on July 8 that Coquitlam’s current OCP is about four times larger than similar-sized municipalities and has a collection of 13 plans, with more than:
- 1,000 pages
- 2,100 policies
- 1,000 guidelines
- 150 maps
- 60 land-use designations
Chow said consolidating the 2002 document, by removing redundancies and outdated material, will make it user friendly. As well, the new OCP will be restructured and have standard formatting and terminology.
A consultant will be hired to rewrite the Urban Design Guidelines while a copy editor will be recruited to maintain style and consistency; a glossary will be included.
The draft work will come before city council for consideration in the fall of 2025, following a public hearing, and will likely follow these policy themes, in general:
- growth management
- housing
- environment and natural hazards
- transportation
- infrastructure
- economy
- climate change and resilience
- community amenities
- arts, culture and heritage
Andrew Merrill, Coquitlam’s general manager of planning and development services, said the new OCP will be “reimagined and refocused” to clean up the extensive document.
And it will include the provincial government’s housing mandates that were introduced to B.C. municipalities last November, such as the Housing Needs Report update plus policies related to Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing and Transit-Oriented Areas.
Those government changes will be addressed in a single OCP change instead of a series of separate amendments for each project.
Coun. Trish Mandewo asked if the project could use an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help refine the document. Merrill said AI is currently being used more for development building applications.
The progress report on the OCP update passed unanimously.
