North Cowichan’s mayor says the municipality must secure funding for costly infrastructure before housing developments can proceed.
Rob Douglas says North Cowichan has a proportional amount of land available for development but faces the same challenges as other Vancouver Island communities.
“We’ve zoned enough land to support a significant amount of new housing developments, but we simply don’t have the infrastructure,” said Douglas. “To make the upgrades for new infrastructure would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”
North Cowichan currently has 10,000 housing-unit applications sent out to private developers and BC Housing, but Douglas worries the existing infrastructure cannot handle that many units.
“Our infrastructure can only support 4,200 new housing units,” Douglas said. “This would be decades worth of growth, but we’re telling developers coming forward with new applications that we don’t have the capacity, in the water and sewer system, to accommodate some of these projects.”
The biggest infrastructure project needed for growth is relocating the sewage outfall from the Cowichan River to the embayment line at Cowichan Bay, and Douglas says the price tag continues to climb.
“We’re now looking at a $95 million price tag for that project, and that is way beyond the scope of what we can pay for North Cowichan or our partners,” the mayor said. “We have secured a couple of grants through the federal and provincial governments, but it’s simply not enough.”
He says to build all the proposals put forward to council; it would cost the municipality $360 million in infrastructure investments and will require funding from senior levels of government to proceed.
