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Balancing 'open for business' with 'more'

Remember when you were a kid? I mean a younger kid, not a faux-functioning adult kid like most of us are today. One of the jobs we all had as kids was to push the envelop, test the limits.
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Remember when you were a kid? I mean a younger kid, not a faux-functioning adult kid like most of us are today. One of the jobs we all had as kids was to push the envelop, test the limits. We tested our own limits all the time: strength, endurance, willpower, sneakiness, ability to fabricate believable stories to explain things best left unexplained, seeing how obnoxious we could be before someone beat the snot out of us.

And we tested our parents' limits. We drove them to distraction needling our siblings, made them wish they'd stayed childless with our sloth and truculence, stayed out later than we were supposed to, thought we were successfully sneaking their booze when they easily detected the water we'd replaced it with, shenanigans like that.

Eventually, most of us outgrew it, accepted the limitations of what passed for polite society — or found/forged a social structure more in keeping with our antisocial ways — and got on with the business of being as responsible as we could... or needed to be, given the situation we found ourselves in.

The rest of us became developers.

Okay, that's an unfair, comic generalization. Truth be told, I hold many developers in high esteem. Without them we might all be living in caves or mean sod huts. Ironically though, developers and many business leaders share the same twist in their DNA common to union leaders. They all want more. More of everything, in both the Gomperian and Seinfeldian sense. More density, more tax breaks, more freedom to do business as they please — which means less regulation and government interference, for example, planning, zoning, safety and environmental — more profit and more grateful empathy from everyone for their bold risk taking and misunderstood plight.

More, more, more.

Without scouring the annals of development, I think it's safe to say very few, if any, planning departments have ever heard a developer say, "You know, I really don't think I need approval for this much square footage. I'd really rather build a smaller development."

By contrast, developers coming back to the table to ask for more is as predictable as little Oliver asking for another bowl of gruel. You know it's going to happen and you're never surprised when it does.

And so it goes, somewhere over the Rainbow. Same old, same old. "We need a bigger gas station/convenience store." "We need more space to make our commercial project viable." "We need more space for storage." "We need more." "More."

For too many years, we heard the same cry from local government. "We need more tax revenue to keep services at current levels, for the buildup to the Olympics, to make up for the windfall we lost when condos went back to being taxed the way they originally were, for whatever." The relentless cry for more got us to the place we were last November when so many of said so resoundingly, "Enough! Time to do things a different way and figure out how to do what you need to do with what you've got."

The people we elected said that's what they'd do. Or was it the people who said they'd do that got elected? Whatever. So far, they haven't disappointed. They more or less rolled back the most aggravating features of pay parking. They've vowed to hold property taxes at the same level they were last year. They've found savings in their first, truncated kick at the budget can and they've held out the promise of more savings when they get their teeth in it for a full year.

But the real tests are just starting. Having to write this early in the day Tuesday, I don't know how they're going to respond to the Rainbow developer's most recent cry for more. I know I'll be in the peanut gallery Tuesday evening and I'm hoping it'll be an interesting show.

Personally, I'd like to see them punt, for the same reason I urged the last council to punt the developer's request to — surprise — increase the size of the gas station across the street. When you've got development A, gas station/convenience store, on one corner and development B, "neighbourhood" commercial plaza on the opposite corner, it is folly to approve one without the other. It's a single development, notwithstanding being on two strata lots. Approve one without the other and sure as the snow falls on Whistler Mountain the first day of spring, the developer will use the one to leverage the other. The two should be approved in the same way they're going to have to operate — in harmony.

The battle for more commercial at Rainbow is likely to be positioned as a fight between holding the line and being open for business. This mayor and council also ran on a "Whistler is open for business," platform. The problem is, no one really knows what that means.

Does being open for business mean we're going to run a more efficient, less-time consuming, more straight-forward process to evaluate business proposals and either grant timely approvals or deliver a speedy "No thanks"? Does it mean we're going to embrace a growth strategy and try to grow our way to prosperity at, perhaps, suffering all the costs associated with growth? Does it mean we're going to actively seek out business partners in strategically targeted niches we wish to embrace? Does it mean anything goes in Tiny Town?

I don't know, and neither do you?

Open for business is one of those political motherhood phrases that mean whatever someone wants it to mean. It may mean one thing in Rainbow and something else when the long-anticipated Whistler University real estate, er, higher education plan is revealed any day now.

Whatever it means, it should be informed by our incomplete official community plan. It should embrace the vision of the successful resort community we've said over and over we'd like to be. It should improve the quality of life for everyone who's trying to make a life here, not simply increase the profits of those doing the hard work of development.

I live in Rainbow and I'm concerned about doing this right. The town needs another gas station and this is the default location. Fair enough. The neighbourhood was planned to include some convenience shopping but how much? Enough to be economically viable and not become a strip plaza of abandoned shops but not so much as to make the other, identical businesses all unprofitable.

The answers aren't easy, even though the requests are predictable. This is where we begin to see the whether we've elected wise leaders or not. This is where community interest and participation becomes vital. And this is a good time to set aside self-interest.