City wants to study new LEED community planning process

The City recently applied for a provincial grant through the Community Action on Energy and Emissions Gold program. According to the Corporate Report, the City has been proactive in recent years at examining future district heating systems within Surrey’s Town Centres. Both the City Centre and Semiahmoo Town Centre have been identified as potential areas for the geothermal exchange systems. 

Of more particular interest to smart growth and community minded individuals, are the proposals the City makes if they were to win the money. The first is a District Heating and Sewer Heat Recovery Strategy for the City Centre. The second, however, is called the “Surrey Integrated Design Process for Local Area Plans“.

The City currently creates subsets of the Official Community Plan, called Neighbourhood Concept Plans (or Local Area Plans in the past), which define where housing, commercial space, and services will go in each community. At the moment, community advocates aren’t too keen on the process of these plans, which is very top-down and quite mechanical, rather than bottom up based on what the community wants for it’s future. 

The proposal intends to improve this whole process, making it much more sustainable, while also engaging the community much more. The proposal includes to:

• use the LEED-ND framework (LEED for Neighbourhood Development, a brand new protocol) to assist with the NCP development and planning. LEED-ND examines multi-building sites and full neighbourhoods, rather than simply one building. LEED-ND includes sustainable land use, building, and transportation criteria.
• LEED supports an Integrated Design Process, which is basically a community stakeholders workshop, or charette, done at the very beginning of the planning process
• implementing the LEED-ND framework will allow the City staff and community to build knowledge around a sutainable development rating system, the likes of which is consistent with one major goal of the City’s Sustainability Charter