At the Committee of the Whole on May 12, Council directed staff to bring forward amendment Bylaws including a Steep Slopes Development Permit Area. In consultation with qualified professionals, the Steep Slopes DPA is applicable to lands within the District with a slope gradient of 30% or greater.

For road grades, the proposed guideline represents a departure from current practice, where strata roads are permitted to use steeper grades. The report notes that even small delays experienced on steep roads in good conditions result in larger and more difficult to control fires.

In response to feedback received during the engagement process, staff have edited several elements of the DPA:

• Staff removed Development Permit exemptions requiring landowners to produce a report by a qualified professional or surveyor that shows a development project does not impact slope stability. New provisions have been added that exempt properties less than 0.2 ha with an existing dwelling or where a qualified professional provides a letter that the proposal does not impact slope stability;
• Concerns regarding a guideline that discourages extensive grading to create large development terraces has been refined to refer to extensive cut and fill;
• For retaining walls, the guidelines have been modified to include support for wall heights up to 2.4 m where the wall is more than 6.0 m from a property boundary; the draft guideline included a height limit of 1.2 m, after which terracing was required; and
• Staff increased the threshold at which point an assessment of slope stability by a qualified professional engineer is required for excavations, from 0.5 m to 1.2 m, to exempt minor projects. The applicability of this guideline was expanded to address cut slopes in addition to excavations.

More information can be found in the full report by District staff.