As booming Squamish grows into mid-sized city, council aims to preserve community

If you wanted one person to represent the changing face of Squamish, B.C.,Jenna Stoner might be it.

Five years ago, she moved to the growing city "mainly for the lifestyle and to be closer to nature,"part of a wave of young people attracted to the city's mix of recreation, affordability, and location between Vancouver and Whistler.

Now, she's a newly elected councillor,focused on bridging the infrastructure gap that has come with huge population growth while also uniting the two sides of the generational gap between those who havelived in Squamish for decades, and those who have moved in over the past decade.

"I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of bridging our community," Stoner said.

"Part of it is representing those folks like myself who have recently moved here, but the other part of it is making sure that everybody who lives in Squamish has a sense of home in this place that they like to call home."

Rapid growth

Stoner's sentiments can be heard around town and found in columns in the local newspaper.

The combination of the new Sea-to-Sky Highway, glowing reviews from provincial magazines and the New York Times, and the spillover effect of affordability challenges in Metro Vancouver hascreated a unique political dynamic.

"There's opportunities in that but also challenges," said Mayor Karen Elliott, whomoved to Squamishin 2012 because her family couldn't find anywhere in the Lower Mainland that was affordable when they wanted to return from Australia.

"This influx of people creates change. It's creating more density. It's creating higher buildings and some people don't like that. Soone of the challenges is, how do we maintain that sense of community?"

The population of Squamish was less than 15,000 people a decade ago but now is more than 20,000and the recently passed Official Community Plan says that could double in the next 20 years.

The only B.C. municipalities that have grown morein the past decade are all directly connected to major urban centres, making Squamish's challenges particularly acute.

"We don't have sidewalks everywhere but people want those now because they want their kids to be able to walk to school safely. I get that," said Elliott. "We still don't have a snowplow," she added.

"Water, sewer, storm management: all those sorts of things that people don't think about everyday we make progress on these things every year. But we can't meet those expectations."

Tense election

Little wonder that Squamish's election was among the more spirited in B.C. last October, with 22 people running for council (the most of any municipality under 30,000 people), no political parties and no single issue defining the race.

"Itwas just consistent attacks: You wake up in the morning and go to bed reading social media about yourself," said Susan Chapelle, a two-term councillor who lost her bid to become mayor.

Like the other mayoral candidates, Chapellespoke not of stopping Squamish's growth, but of managing it, particularly when ensuring thatbusiness and transit infrastructure matched population increases.

"We only have one road in and out of downtown and yet we're adding thousands of people into our downtown area," she said.

"We've always been the community that has so much potential.But realizing that potential requires thinking not just about where people live, but where people work and play and gather."

Mixed council

Despite the challenges, the new council has optimism it will be able to guide Squamish through the transition.

"They picked [candidates] who were of different views and quite a different range along the political spectrum," said Doug Race, the only councillor who served prior to last election.

He doesn't think there's as much of a generational divide as Stoner does.

"I'm not sure if that was intentional or not but that's certainly the way it turned out. And so we have [people] who are respectful, intelligent but they certainly have come from different places politically."

They will have their hands full over the next four years, with densification of downtown and development of the waterfront on the agenda, to say nothing of the incoming Woodfibre LNG plant.

But Elliott is confident the city will manage the challenges.

"I think there is an acknowledgment that we're going to grow," she said.

"But how do we do that in a thoughtful way and a way that preserves some of the things we love about Squamish? Our vision statement says we're a small town with a big heart and we don't want to lose that."

Metro Matters: On The Roadis exploring how new city governments throughout B.C. are approaching age-old issues (some political, some not) in their communities.