A comprehensive plan designed to tackle development and public safety in Quesnel was revealed at the latest (Oct 21) City Council meeting.
Tanya Turner, the Director of Development Services, said “the purpose of this report is to support is to summarize the multi-pronged approach to support sustainable housing development, vulnerable populations and public safety within the city. While this report does not contain every aspect of the City’s work on these issues, it means to provide a broad vision of the current challenges, Council’s stated strategic objectives to address the issues and specific actions that Council and staff can undertake, through action or advocacy, to deal with them.”
Turner noted that the new actions are intended to form portions of the 2026 Operations Plan.
“Actions include development of new multi-family housing the City in line with an updated Official Community Plan, Housing Needs Assessment, including workforce housing, supportive housing and shelter. Also, tools and resources to address repeat offenders, property crime, nuisance and/or unsightly properties and support for vulnerable populations.”
Turner also provided an update on nuisance and unsightly properties.
“We did do a significant amount of work this year with 90 unsightly property files initiated in the bylaw office. 74 files have been concluded with the majority with bylaw’s work to get to owner compliance. There was an inventory developed for staff review that’s really going to bring out some of these long standing properties and work to develop a plan of action on how to address some long term properties. Some really good successes did come, we had a number of properties that we were able to encourage either the owner to remove some derelict buildings that have been plaguing certain areas of the community as well as the demolition of three buildings that were destroyed by fire and were also problems for specific neighbourhoods.”
City Manager Joel McKay said they were trying to tackle these issues from a multi-faceted perspective, and do what’s within their jurisdiction and what is in their control, rather than just blame senior levels of government.
Several Councillors called for more comprehensive discussion on all of these issues, either through committee work or strategic planning.
