At their most recent regular meeting on July 4th, the Galiano Island Trustees killed a rezoning application designed to restore normal public access to Dionisio Point Provincial Park which has been barricaded for the past 27 years. This rezoning application had been strongly recommended by their own staff as conforming with the Official Community Plan and closely based on an adjacent rezoning precedent. Instead, this decision simply perpetuates a seemingly endless deadlock.

The legislated object and duty of the Islands Trust is to preserve and protect “the unique amenities and environment” of the trust area for the benefit of all British Columbians, in cooperation with the British Columbia government and other agencies. By definition, amenities provide benefits to people. Everybody familiar with Dionisio Point appreciates that this park is an exceptionally unique amenity, which should be fully accessible for public enjoyment with appropriate care for its sensitive ecological and cultural features.

While BC Parks has made strenuous efforts to solve the access problem, the Galiano Local Trust Committee has chosen not to cooperate, instead moving the goalposts each time that a solution was nearly finalized within the LTC’s own parameters.

The barricaded private road to Dionisio Point Provincial Park is a million dollar paved highway that was completed in 1995 at the expense of three groups of families of ordinary means who had previously stretched their resources to purchase quarter section District Lots 79, 85 and 86. These lands were then subdividable into 20 acre lots with one home allowed on each lot. These owners bought their land in 1993 for cottage and retirement purposes, and have been rooted on that land ever since. Their pending subdivisions were aborted by an appeal court decision enabling the Islands Trust to change the zoning.

Seeking to reduce overall residential density and minimize forest fragmentation, the Galiano LTC moved the zoning goalposts to raise minimum forest lot size to 50 acres, allowing conversion back to 20 acre density only after obligatory “donation” (or “confiscation”, depending on your perspective!) of 75% of the land and much of any waterfront.

Fourteen years ago, BC Parks joined with the owners in a land assembly initiative to expand Dionisio Point Park with 100 acres plus the paved road to be contributed by the owners, and the additional 160 acres of District Lot 87 to be purchased from a logging company at a cost to the provincial government of $700,000 topped up by a $68,000 contribution from the owners. This plan was advanced with the vision of creating a “North Galiano parkland corridor” linking with the protected area network then being assembled by the Galiano Conservancy Association.

In order to confirm the feasibility of this initiative, BC Parks met in 2008 with the Islands Trust to discuss the proposal; and was encouraged to proceed. After the above large investments were made in good faith and BC Parks purchased DL 87, the Galiano LTC refused to take the rezoning proposal (which included the provincial government as an applicant) to public hearing, thus moving its rezoning goalposts to block density transfer from provincial lands while failing its duty of cooperation with the provincial government.

A viable solution to this deadlock emerged six years ago. One of the three lots (District Lot 79) on the Dionisio Point road was successfully rezoned with a mixed rezoning formula in which some owners give up 75% of their land to maximize "Rural Residential" density, and another owner (my family in this instance) gives up potential density in order to retain a 50 acre "F3" forest parcel while entering a sustainable forestry covenant. This mixed rezoning example is now written into the Galiano Island Official Community Plan. The owners giving up land also donated 1/3 of their waterfront for a new community park. As the “F3” parcel was not required to donate any land or waterfront, the net waterfront donation was approximately 20% of the total waterfront of DL 79.

The other owners (District Lots 85 and 86) more recently decided to follow this rezoning precedent, offering to donate the land shown as orange patches in the above map. This would connect the several scattered parcels already owned by the provincial government into the proposed North Galiano parkland corridor. Straightforward application of the DL 79 rezoning precedent would complete a vast protected area network and finally restore full public access to Dionisio Point.

These rezoning proposals for Lots 85 and 86 came before the most recent regular monthly meeting of the Galiano Local Trust Committee on July 4th. Despite a positive report from Trust planning staff that these proposals fully met Official Community Plan policy requirements, the Trustees swiftly killed the Lot 85 application and put the Lot 86 application in abeyance in expectation of being killed later. Moving the goalposts once again and without any community consultation, the Trustees announced that they would not follow the OCP basic forest policy of allowing an owner to conduct sustainable forestry on a 50 acre F3 zoned parcel.

The new goalposts would require all of the owners to donate 75% of their land plus 66% of their private waterfront, contrasting with 20% of the waterfront donated in the DL 79 precedent. Apart from being wildly unfair, this is a nonstarter since owners doing sustainable forestry on 50 acres will not accept a pair of 5 acre residential lots despite the higher real estate value. More generally, people will not accept being uprooted from recreational home sites spread along the waterfront that they have owned and occupied for half a lifetime.

The Trustees’ decision to perpetuate this futile deadlock was made without considering the public benefits from opening access to Dionisio Point Park. The Islands Trust has not shown any interest in completing the north Galiano parkland corridor within a larger protected area network for conservation of unfragmented coastal Douglas-fir forest, with low-key hiking and equestrian trails.

Careful planning will be necessary to protect the fragile wildflower meadows and archaeological sites of Dionisio Point. Community and indigenous concerns about future pressures on this delicate area could be addressed by keeping motor vehicles out of the park, so that day-use visitors would have to walk the 1.5 kilometer distance from a parking area at the end of the existing paved road.

The long frustrated public access to Dionisio Point could soon be opened if the Galiano Trustees worked with that purpose in mind, while treating rezoning applications with procedural consistency and fairness.

Bowie Keefer