You won’t find broom manufacturing in New Westminster’s new zoning bylaw as the city makes a clean sweep of its dated bylaw.
Staff in the city’s development services department have been working to update the city’s zoning bylaw, which is considered big, old and hard to understand.
“This bylaw is over three-quarters of a century old. It uses terms that are no longer commonplace, such as chattel, which makes usage of the bylaw difficult for the user – and for myself as well,” said senior planner Barry Waitt. “This bylaw is very large. It is 514 pages and contains 79 conventional zoning districts.”
Waitt noted that the current zoning bylaw has been edited by dozens of authors in the past 75 years, so it’s filled with inconsistencies. New Westminster’s zoning bylaw is currently larger than the City of Vancouver’s.
But that’s going to change, as hundreds of pages are chopped as part of a comprehensive revamping of the document.
While the zoning bylaw is an important tool for implementation of council policies, Waitt said a new bylaw will provide improved clarity and the elimination of unclear terminology or contradictory terms. It will also be more user friendly for the citizens and developers to understand and won’t change what people are allowed to do.
“The new zoning bylaw is primarily intended to be a restructuring and reordering exercise,” Waitt explained.
At the end of the process, the city hopes to offer up a new zoning bylaw that’s more clear, consistent, simple and user-friendly for the public, developers, staff and council. You’ll have to sift through fewer pages and categories to find the information you’re looking for, and along the way you’ll find simpler wording and more charts, sketches and diagrams.
Planning technician Mike Watson recently told council about some of the cuts proposed in the draft of the new zoning bylaw.
These include dropping the number of zoning districts from 79 to 47 (a 47 per cent reduction), slashing the number of definitions from more than 200 to 119 (a 40 per cent reduction) and reducing the number of land-use categories from 64 to 18 in the light-industrial districts (a 72 per cent decrease).
Not to worry if you’re interested in starting up a broom manufacturing business; you’ll still be able to do that – you just won’t find it listed as a permitted use as it will be lumped into a larger manufacturing category.
The new zoning bylaw hasn’t been adopted, as it still has to be reviewed by the city’s advisory planning commission and the New Westminster design panel. Staff will take it out to the public for input later this year.
