City holds public consultation as part of sustainable development plan

The City has identified sustainable development as essential to keeping Westmount vibrant. The planning initiative includes both municipal departments and the community at large. To start the process, the City invited Westmounters to take part in a community-wide discussion on creating a sustainability vision statement.

The first of the meetings took place on Tuesday evening at Victoria Hall. Two more meetings are scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 16 at 7 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 16 at 2 p.m., also at the hall.

Residents who are interested can also write comments on one or more of the vision statement drafts available on the City’s web site, or through membership in a Westmount group or association which are collaborating on the project. “You start by developing a vision, and then from the vision you look at what things will fall from that,” Marks, who attended the meeting, told the Examiner. She added that Westmount already has a short clause in its urban plan about using environmentally sustainable materials, “but we need to be doing much more.”

Although the City has yet to make any firm decisions on the design of a new arena complex slated for development in the next few years, one aspect that was determined early on was that the new building would be constructed to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) specifications, which is a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction.

This proactive example set by the City could eventually be more widely applied. “That’s part of what we want to come out of this,” Marks said. “Once you have a vision, and part of that vision is sustainability in terms of materials — all kinds of things like that — then you start to say, okay, what do we need to do in terms of our bylaws, in order to assure that this vision is a reality?”

According to Joshua Wolfe, the City’s Sustainable Development Coordinator who is animating the consultations, Westmount’s urban planning regulations could be amended to have more rigid sustainability requirements, “in the medium term, but I can’t give you a time frame as to when that will happen, because it depends on a lot of different issues, because it requires all sorts of preparation. It requires staff to amend bylaws and code.”

Regarding LEED certification as applied to a community, Wolfe noted that the LEED movement started with a focus on architecture “and didn’t give enough attention to planning … They are now recognizing that the LEED process has to look into existing communities … We need to look at LEED, but there may be other things that will need to be modified in order to recognize the special qualities of Westmount as a neighbourhood.”