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Stephanie Ryan: Surrey needs real sustainable development, not just rhetoric

By Stephanie Ryan – June 5, 2009

Sustainability. It’s the current buzzword in Surrey. But city council’s actions belie the rhetoric.

Take, for example, the recent suggestion by one of Mayor Dianne Watts’s council team to swap “unfarmable” land out of the Agricultural Land Reserve to use it for industrial purposes, including truck parking.

The ALR was established in 1972 by the NDP government to protect farmland so that present and future generations would be able to grow healthy, local food. In 1973, 86 percent of the vegetables consumed in B.C. were grown in this province. Today, only 43 percent of the vegetables we eat are local.

The whole purpose of the ALR is to ensure food security for British Columbians into the future. So why in the world would we continue to remove land from Surrey, which contains some of the Fraser Valley’s most productive farmland?

Is that really sustainable?

Or is this? In 2002, Surrey’s Surrey Electors Team council, including Watts and several other councillors, voted to approve massive sprawling industrial development in Campbell Heights—an isolated area accessible neither by rail nor river.

The development essentially destroyed the neighbouring salmon watershed on the Little Campbell River. Latimer Lake was inadvertently drained as water levels dropped substantially, and is not ever likely to return to its natural state.

Is destroying a precious salmon watershed and the bordering farmland in Campbell Heights a wise choice, given our long-term environmental prospects?

There is no doubt we are facing a shortage of industrial land in this region, and that we need to do more to contribute to the industrial lands base. But let’s be strategic about it. Why go straight to Campbell Heights when there are many other industrial areas in Surrey—South Westminster, Port Kells, Bridgeview—that could and should be leveraged first.

Our shortage of industrial land in the GVRD certainly hasn’t been helped by the destruction of industrial land in Surrey’s Newton industrial core. That neighbourhood has filled with a myriad of low-density office and business parks, shops, and Wal-Marts—as opposed to the industrial warehouses and manufacturing centres we need to invest in for long-term, sustainable economic growth.

Filling Newton’s industrial core with car-dependent office parks hasn’t helped the long-term struggle to encourage office and commercial development in Surrey city centre. Because so many groups have been able to find inexpensive office space with free parking in Newton, there is basically zero demand for new office space in sustainable mixed-use developments in city centre.

The lack of foresight about where our farmland will go, where our salmon will go, where our industrial development will go, and where our commercial development will go has led to unsustainable, car-dependent development of the worst kind.

What should be done to encourage real sustainable development in Surrey?

First, we need to scrap the notion that the only solution to the truck parking shortage in Surrey is to remove parcels of land from the ALR. City council could easily rezone existing industrial land in South Westminster to allow temporary truck parking solutions in this industrial area, where they belong.

Second, we need to take a long-term perspective for land use in Surrey. By allowing low-density office parks and one-storey big box stores to pop up just about everywhere, we are decreasing our industrial capacity for the future, increasing car-dependency, and lessening our leverage to bring sustainable office development into the city centre.

We also need to protect our environment for the future, and to be serious about not destroying the few sensitive environmental areas we have left. If we want the capacity to grow our own healthy, local food in the future, we should consider an urban containment boundary that protects green space and farmland both in the ALR and outside of it.

The rhetoric about sustainability in Surrey will be only as good as the actions that substantiate it.

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