Next step, a draft plan

The Jasper Community Sustainability Plan (CSP) continued its community consultation on Wednesday, March 25, with a full-day workshop focused on setting actions and strategies for previously set goals.

About 50 people attended, including municipal workers, Parks employees, councillors, and local business owners. Participants were broken into four groups (home, work, infrastructure and community) who spent the day coming up with definitive actions for the plan.

The groups’ discussions were kept within certain parameters to keep them synonymous, said Hooper. 

According to the parameters, participants had to keep in mind the current town boundary, the commercial cap and commercial district, as well as the eligible residency regulation. “Otherwise we would run into the situation where some groups would talk about ignoring the current restrictions and we’d be not operating within the same context,” he said. 

In an effort to communicate with a broader range of Jasperites, the actions resolved at Wednesday’s workshop were displayed at the Upper Curling Lounge the following day, on Thursday, March 26. About 30 people attended this evening event, most of whom were present at the full-day workshop as well. They were given the opportunity to respond to the actions and strategies outlined by the groups at the workshop, as well as discuss governance, a topic which had not yet been discussed.

Hooper said there were “a lot of really terrific ideas for strategies to advance the various goals that the community has developed previously.” According to Hooper, once the consultants have consolidated the information received at both the full-day workshop and evening event, the raw data will be available online for all to read and comment.

While it’s looking like the community will have a draft sustainability plan by mid-June, it won’t be before a lot of discussion, at least between the Working Group and Steering Committee (which includes the mayor, council and Jasper National Park’s superintendent), to work out what that plan should look like. Given that the workshops were just one week ago, it is still too early for Hooper to speak about the upcoming process of events for sorting out issues, but the community will be kept in the loop as the steps unfold. 

It only took a quick look around the room at Thursday’s presentation of strategies to see some fundamental differences of opinion, but if you ask Working Group chair Ron Hooper, everything will be worked out in the end. “It’s really a case of sitting with the Steering Committee and identifying where there is difference of opinion or strategies that are at odds with one another,” he said. 

“A number of them are quite straightforward and there maybe a technical solution, in other cases there is fundamental differences in views of residents and we have to make the decision: do we need to go back to the community or segments of the community that have those differing opinions and further explore it?”

As for the attendance at these meetings, as always, Hooper suggested that the working group has high expectations in regards to numbers of participants, but overall was happy with the response.

“Everybody was a resident of the community and they bring a range of experience and background... our sense was that we did get a cross section [of the community]. We always wish for a lot of participation but certainly we went out of our way to encourage a wide a cross section of the community,” said Hooper.

“It’s really up to residents to determine whether they have the time and interest in participating.” The raw data collected at these two workshops will be available online at http://jasperplan.wordpress.com.