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Council approves cash in lieu of mandatory employee suites

Move recommended after strata councils in Gondola Village, Tamarisk raised objections to covenant swaps

Homeowners who are required to put a secondary suite in their homes can now be relieved of their obligation with a $150,000 donation to the Whistler Housing Authority.

Council accepted this cash-in-lieu policy at Monday’s regular meeting, with only Councillor Gordon McKeever withholding his support.

The policy was developed by the Whistler Housing Authority board of directors and the non-cost housing initiatives task force after an earlier recommendation from the task force raised the ire of homeowners in Gondola Village and Tamarisk.

That earlier recommendation allowed the owner of a large single family home in Taluswood, who was required under a covenant to build a suite in his home, to buy a unit at Gondola Village instead.

The unit cost the Taluswood owner $250,000 and was later sold to a Whistler resident on the WHA wait list for $87,000. The unit is now permanently registered in the WHA pool of housing.

Homeowners in housing complexes like Gondola Village and Tamarisk, which could support these covenant swaps, complained that they were not properly consulted in the process.

"When Gondola Village found out after the fact that the Whistler Housing Authority had acquired a unit in our complex, the principal objection of our owners is that is was done behind our back and we were blindsided," said Ross Ruddick, strata chair for Gondola Village, after Monday’s meeting.

"And we believe that advance consultation with Whistler Housing would have probably eliminated a lot of the antagonism that our owners feel about the issue."

Ruddick said he was pleased to see council adopt the cash-in-lieu policy because he said it would have a real impact in creating a fund to build more employee housing.

However, he questioned the debate at the council table, which called for the payment to be raised higher than $150,000.

A number of councillors expressed concern that the payment should be higher. Councillor Ken Melamed tried to increase the payment to $250,000, without success.

Ruddick said increasing the payment would effectively kill the program and that council forgot the rationale for why that figure was chosen by the task force, the WHA board of directors and supported by Ruddick and other Gondola Village homeowners.

"Essentially there is an understanding in Whistler that the current covenant bylaw is pretty toothless in that people that have properties with covenants are complying with the bylaw and building a suite but they’re never having that suite occupied and many of them are quietly converting them to other uses at a later date," said Ruddick.

"Both the task force and the board of directors and ourselves recognized that in order to bring out people’s honesty, the dollar figure would have to be reasonable and the $150,000 was basically arrived at as being a reasonable figure that would motivate people to contribute to the fund to eliminate the covenant on their property."

Municipal staff’s rationale for supporting the $150,000 figure is that it’s roughly the difference between the value of a small market suite and the small employee-restricted suite.

Ruddick was also concerned that council did not approve a motion put on the table by Councillor Kristi Wells, which would allow a covenant swap to occur if a strata council majority approved that direction.

Both the board of the WHA and the task force supported this motion.

"I think our biggest disappointment is that council seems to refer a lot of issues back to staff or to a task force and yet having done that when they do get the advice from those bodies, they don’t seem to accept that advice," said Ruddick.

"We think that a voluntary compliance would have been much better, not only for the strata concerned but also for the Whistler Housing Authority, in that if the city is going to convince the public that resident restricted housing is a good thing, the best way to achieve that is to make it voluntary so that people embrace the concept and welcome it into their communities.

"By doing what they did and rejecting Kristi’s motion last night, they’re almost tacitly admitting that people don’t want resident restricted housing in a strata and the only way to place it is to force it upon them."

Councillor Caroline Lamont said she did not support the motion to allow strata councils to approve resident housing in their individual complexes because that makes strata councils another level in the approval process.

She said putting the decision to the strata councils fundamentally discriminates against people who live in resident housing and, as such, she could not support it.

"In my opinion, it’s telling the community that people that live in WHA units are undesirable," she said after the meeting.

The original concept of the covenant swap came from the non-cost housing initiatives task force, a group charged with finding was to create more affordable housing in the valley and stem the leakage of employees to neighbouring communities.

Councillor Gordon McKeever voted against the cash-in-lieu policy because the original recommendation for a covenant swap would not have resulted in many WHA conversions in existing homes.

There are roughly 50 homeowners, some in Taluswood, Treetops Lane, and Spruce Grove, among others, who are required by covenant to have suites in their homes.

McKeever said there are all kinds of different stripes of resident housing in Whistler. The covenant swap could be one of them.

Wells also raised concerns that the original recommendation actually produced a physical unit to go into the rental pool, whereas the new policy will just add to a fund.

She suggested that stakeholders brainstorm ways to get the money actually producing something tangible.