METRO VANCOUVER -- Some of Metro Vancouver’s mayors are lamenting the lack of new office towers outside downtown Vancouver, saying it’s hampering their ability to build complete communities in their growing town centres.

The concern prompted Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan to call for some tough decisions, even asking Vancouver to reject new office developments so as to encourage their construction elsewhere in the region. About 45 per cent of the large office towers with 10,000 sq.ft. or more of space in Metro Vancouver are either in Vancouver’s Broadway corridor or its downtown core, according to a staff report.

“We have to spread the assets around,” Corrigan told directors at a Metro’s regional planning committee meeting Friday. “We need to be able to develop communities where people can work where they live.

“If we don’t do that in Burnaby and Coquitlam and Surrey and Langley ... it’s not surprising you end up with absolute (traffic) congestion and at some point make (the region) unlivable.”

The committee was looking at an update of the region’s office tower inventory showed the majority of large developments, such as company headquarters, are in Vancouver. Smaller projects, such as those housing doctors, dentists and lawyers tend to be spread across the region.

Suburban directors argue that they need a bigger share of the region’s office towers, as well as residential and commercial if they are meet the goals of the regional growth strategy, a blueprint that specifically lays out how the region should grow to accommodate one million more people by 2040.

The strategy calls for higher density in urban centres around transit stations, in a bid to preserve agricultural and industrial land and limit sprawl. But Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart said that while his city is developing town centres — and preserving what industrial land the city has left — it is finding it difficult to attract office tower development.

“I understand they’re free to go where they want but when there’s an oversupply in one spot …,” said Stewart. “If we truly believe in complete communities across Metro Vancouver, we should not just be looking at industrial land but at the land in the sky, which is office space.”

Burnaby is attractive to new office developments because it is so close to Vancouver, he said, but suggested that if a new stadium had been built in Surrey, for instance, rather than replacing the roof on BC Place, it would have drastically changed the landscape by acting as a catalyst for office tower development in that city. Similar arguments apply for art galleries or convention centres, he said.

“You can’t put all your amenities in downtown Vancouver,” he said. “In outlying areas none of us get any of these investments to build our communities.”

Vancouver Coun. Raymond Louie dismissed Corrigan’s suggestion, saying the issue isn’t about “us versus them,” noting Vancouver for years had trouble attracting office towers and company headquarters. He added the Metro Vancouver board endorsed his city’s regional context statement, which laid out Vancouver’s goal of boosting office space in its downtown and Broadway corridors.

“It’s about making sure we have the proper services and job space in and around our region,” he said. “There’s this thing called location. People like to have proximity to different services.”

The committee agreed to a suggestion by New Westminster Mayor Jonathan Cote to direct Metro staff prepare a report and potential policy on office space.

Meanwhile, the committee disagreed on considering a land bank to preserve industrial land similar to what is done now with the Agricultural Land Reserve. Port Metro Vancouver has called for such a scheme.

Corrigan argued there is no appetite for corralling industrial land, saying the region’s municipalities should focus on intensifying it by, for instance, building taller industrial buildings rather than allowing them to sprawl out with a mass of parking lots.

“(Municipalities) are not at the state where they want to draw a circle around industrial land and say it’s untouchable,” he said.

Vancouver Coun. Andrea Reimer argued Metro should be taking the lead on the discussions, rather than letting Port Metro investigate the issue on its own. She said while the region is sending clear signals to preserve industrial land in its regional growth strategy, “we’re still seeing big escalating speculation of pieces of land in some future expectation of upzoning of industrial land. We need tools to protect that land from the market.”

Richmond Coun. Harold Steves warned Metro to keep a close eye on the port, which he called “public enemy No. 1.”

ksinoski@postmedia.com

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