with three meetings under its belt, Whistler's Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) is ready to start building the framework for the future of Whistler.
The committee will issue a request for proposals in the coming weeks for a consultant to develop a Community Growth Management Model framework.
Economic development manager and interim general manager of resort experience Toni Metcalf was on hand for the March 3 council meeting to provide an update on the committee's work to date.
"The SPC was established to understand and seek to collaboratively implement Whistler's vision and Official Community Plan (OCP)," Metcalf said. "It's about assisting in proactive development of strategies to manage the resort's activities in alignment with the OCP, and to identify and consider strategic land use issues and opportunities."
Since their first meeting in July, SPC members have agreed on a set of "priority deliverables," Metcalf said, including: defining a base set of metrics to support decision making; establishing a definition of the resort's carrying capacity; developing a framework for balancing economic growth with business and community needs; developing a range of possible future scenarios to understand their implications; and defining tangible metrics and strategic actions in alignment with the community's vision and OCP policies.
"Not all of this is new—it's about now ensuring we understand how a decision in one area may have an impact on another so that we can foresee potentially unintended consequences," Metcalf said.
"So this is about determining that 20-year future for the community. We have the community's vision, we have the policies and goals through the OCP. This is about articulating those in more specific terms."
To give a sense of the breadth of what is being considered at the SPC table, Metcalf showed a slide of the various areas needing to be addressed, either today or in the future.
Affordability, strained community services, the pace of recent population and economic growth, resilience to wildfire, transportation and technology, and effective climate change action are just a few of the factors at play.
"There's a lot there, and the SPC is looking at a very broad aspect of how the community can be successful and continue to be successful," Metcalf said.
The growth management model will build on community monitoring already in place to gain a better understanding of key trends and drivers of growth in the resort over the past two decades.
The model has four objectives: provide an overview of the various drivers of growth; understand possible future scenarios and their impacts; provide measures as targets for each of the base metrics; and have an integrated modelling tool (that will last beyond the committee itself) for evaluation of future major projects or developments.
"The model is intended to integrate all the different aspects of social, environmental and economic outcomes so that we can better understand and drive strategies to get the results that we want to deliver for the community," Metcalf said.
"And this is not a one-way process, obviously; as the experience improves or the experience deteriorates, there is a need to reflect back on what the drivers are, what we can influence ... such that we can continue this cycle."
The SPC expects to engage the community "at various points" throughout 2020 to help inform its work.
When it's all said and done, the goal is to have a strategic plan that includes a decision support framework and articulated targets while setting out recommended strategies and policies that the SPC would then put to council, Metcalf said.
"Examples of those strategies may be specifically around land use, investment in infrastructure, social investments, tourism product development, or visitation management," she said.
Whistler's SPC consists of Mayor Jack Crompton, chief administrator Mike Furey, the general manager of resort experience, director of planning Mike Kirkegaard, members-at-large Emily Amirault, Dave Brownlie, David Dale-Johnson, Robyn Spencer and Dave Williamson, as well as councillors Duane Jackson and Arthur De Jong.
The 2020 budget includes $100,000 for the SPC's work, and another $75,000 in 2021.
