As the Squamish Oceanfront Development Corporation (SODC) ramps up to release the latest version of the master plan, residents continue to make their observations heard, with most recent concerns raised over mercury, viewscapes, limited access and the theatre's size.
SODC representatives continued their discourse with the public this week when about 15 residents toured the Blue Barn, a component of the district-led development reserved for the arts.
The water treatment facility infrastructure still inside the building brought up the question of the remaining mercury content.
"We have to get a lot of the equipment out of there to do some of the testing and find out if it's safe or if it's not," said Oceanfront planner Trevor Dunn. "We have to figure that out."
The majority of the Oceanfront lands have already been remediated to commercial and residential standards, though some portions will never be safe, said Dunn, and the groundwater in those areas will continue to be treated indefinitely.
One portion that has yet to be tested is the ground directly beneath the Blue Barn, and it's important to get the treatment equipment out in order to get accurate readings of the building's interior, said Dunn.
"If the equipment that's treated the mercury is still in place, then it can skew the results of tests on the area," said Dunn.
Doug Olmstead, who has been working in that area since 1990, said he's skeptical.
"Nobody knows exactly what's under there [the Blue Barn building]," said Olmstead. "What they'll find, I can't really say.
"The areas around it have mostly been cleared, but there are places on the land where extremely high concentrations of mercury were found right next to low ones. It may be perfectly OK or it may not."
In order for the equipment to be taken out, the Ministry of Environment has to decommission the building as a treatment plant. It hasn't been used in five years since the new treatment plant starting running, but the ministry wanted to give it a trial period.
Olmstead said he's only seen it used for the water treatment facility and believed it would take a lot of work to turn it into anything else.
Meanwhile, as the broader master plan moves forward, residents continue to raise concerns. Some issues have been voiced again and again, according to Squamish Arts Council (SAC) president Krisztina Egyed.
"We've told them so many times that we don't want the hotel on the prime south beach location, I have over 100 signatures against it," said Egyed. "And they still haven't changed it."
Mayor Greg Gardner said he didn't expect the master plan to be changed because some residents didn't like certain aspects. He said they were free to voice their concerns at the public meeting but that ultimately council will decide whether to go through with the plan.
"The idea was not to come up with a land use plan that would cost the municipality a lot of taxpayer dollars, or frankly, any taxpayer dollars at the end of the day, so they [SODC] are working within those constraints," said Gardner.
Dunn explained that all the decisions in the master plan were well thought out and made to incorporate the interests of everyone in the community and also make the plan economically feasible.
"If you look at the broad class section of community input whether it was economic development, the trails society, the environmental society or the idea of generating jobs, we tried to aggregate all of the responses and create a feasible economic plan that addressed all those things."
