I am proud to have been the vice-chair of our Housing Strategy Task Force. Many thanks to them and staff for all the work done to create this award winning strategy. I commit to increasing our housing supply in the manner outlined in the housing strategy.

I will do this by

- focussing on a district wide approach to housing through a Centres, Corridors and Villages approach that will increase densities and the variety of housing types in the most logical areas within the UCB and create and/or enable 15-20 minute communities that are livable, vibrant, sustainable, transit connected communities that help to reduce our dependance on cars;

- supporting the development of a Missing Middle Policy;

- reviewing planning processes to create efficiency and significantly reduce timelines as recommended in the recent KPMG report, and creating metrics of acceptable timeframes in processes;

- delegating OCP compliant housing proposals to staff for approval; and

- simplifying further the processes for Garden suites as well as the legalization of secondary suites currently in place.

As chair of the Environment and Natural Areas committee, it is clear that we must focus our attention and energy where it will make the biggest difference.

That means that the 90% of sensitive environmental areas which are found in and on Saanich owned lands must be our priority - so parks restoration needs to be our focus in terms of natural areas and biodiversity. This is a huge undertaking and we are fortunate to have many volunteers, but this is not enough. We need to have better metrics about where we are, and more education programs. The report from the Resilient Saanich Technical Committee will be essential to us moving forward in this area.

In addition to direct attention to the environment in our parks, our housing policy is critical to the environment as well. As has been noted - Housing policy is Climate policy. Hence the need for densification in the right places. A recent study out of Berkeley looked at 700 cities and concluded that the single most important thing to do to achieve greenhouse gas reductions is urban infill housing. It had double the impact of housing electrification, and outweighed every other measure significantly.

As we create infill we also need to be sure to increase our green space through parks acquisition, as access to green spaces is important for for healthy living. Saanich has added significant park space this term, with an excellent example being the Kings Park area.

I will continue to recognize the limits to the residents’ ability to pay for services. As such, I will continue to push for a more transparent budget process that starts in the early fall, to ensure that the public can provide meaningful input before the budget is set, and to assist with creating the budget guidelines that are used in budget development.

I will also support and encourage finding new and more efficient ways of delivering services - one very important component of that is through leveraging our IT to allow for more efficient ways to deliver a variety of services, and create and monitor metrics of how we are doing. IT has been identified as an area of significant opportunity that could create huge efficiencies for the organization.