A look at quality of info provided by planning dept: Undimensioned drawings in staff report for proposed tower (2086-2096 West 7th Avenue), no design updates on rezoning info page (hearing June 28)

The rezoning information sign at the Arbutus and West 7th site indicates that the application was updated on May 4, 2022 and shows a link to the City’s web portal ‘for further details’. The amount of new detail released by the City is rather limited.

There’s a short ‘update’ the appears on the City’s ShapeYourCity web portal for the rezoning proposal a West 7th and Arbutus. This can be found in the following announcement:

There appear to be no new drawings, no updated shadow studies, or new urban design analysis on the City’s rezoning portal (we’ve reproduced a snapshot of the top part of the webpage further below, here’s a link to an internet archive snapshot made as of this writing). Would it be a reasonable expectation to be able to see what the updates are on the main rezoning portal? Why does the City not make the updated drawings and updated submission readily available on the main rezoning portal?

The other updates to the rezoning application webpage appear to be a link to a referral report and a link to the Public Hearing agenda page for June 28th. The referral report is dated on May 3, 2022, which is a day before as the rezoning sign indicates there were updates to the application. In other words, planners made a referral report before sharing out the information that there’s been a design update. Is this best practices for planning and for community engagement? Here’s the cover the the referral report:

Is there further information in the staff report? There are a number of undimensioned drawings of the revised proposed. These undimensioned drawings are at a relatively poor quality when compared to the original application submission (via ShapeYourCity). How could one determine the updated dimensions? Some of the drawings have property lines, so with a bit of legwork, one could match the property lines over the drawings, and then scale from there. However, the real question here is why did planning staff choose to add dimensionless drawings to a referral report on a project that has generated much concern? Can they not do better? Is this what is expected from professional planners employed at a large Canadian city? For the record, here are a few of the dimensionless drawings from the staff report:

Click to enlarge (snapshot June 15, 2022)