At the May 23 committee of the whole meeting, clean air advocates urged Sechelt council to get on with implementing a land-clearing burning ban in the District, instead of allowing two years to phase in the prohibition.
The proposed bylaw has been in place for some time so developers have had time to adjust their plans, said Sunshine Coast Clean Air Society chair Jeff Hoag who spoke of the serious health concerns around open air burning for asthmatics and those with breathing issues during the May 23 meeting. Air pollutants from open burning may be responsible for the 40 per cent higher incidence of asthma on the Sunshine Coast over Vancouver where open burning is banned.
The statistic comes from the Ministry of Health's primary health care knowledge base for Vancouver Coastal Health, version 4. The same report shows 2,070 asthmatics living on the Sunshine Coast as of 2010.
In the staff report presented to council it was noted that medical health officer Paul Martiquet has also stated that banning open air burning is a reasonable and rational step towards making the air breathable for asthmatics and others, and that Sechelt is deemed an area of high impact for particulates because of the topography and wind patterns in the area.
Council first looked at changing their open air burning regulations in 2011 realizing that large land clearing burns were detrimental to some. However, they wanted to phase in the prohibition in order to give developers more time to come up with other options for getting rid of land debris.
At the time Sechelt Fire Chief Bill Higgs also recommended the two-year phase-in approach.
My fear is that without reasonable notice, the people who might provide an alternative such as chipping, grinding, trucking and composting will not be properly set up to handle the increased volume that is anticipated. The resulting effect is that woody debris would be left unmanaged, becoming an undue fire risk to the community, Higgs wrote to the District, adding that properly managing land-clearing debris is one of the highest recommendations coming out of the investigation into the wildfires of 2003.
When first looking at the change, council received a petition containing 42 signed letters and emails that called for the phased-in approach as well, many of those letters from people in the building community.
Coast Community Builders' Asso-ciation (CCBA) president Clark Hamilton told Coast Reporter this week that the time is needed to come up with more cost effective options for builders, although the CCBA doesn't want to see burning banned altogether.
The building community would be interested in looking into it if more options were available, but we don't want to be stuck to just one thing. We want to be able to do whatever makes sense, he said, noting the cost of chipping and hauling debris is a serious deterrent for developers. I appreciate the concerns and I certainly empathize with anyone with respiratory problems. You certainly have to be cognizant of that sort of thing, obviously, but we haven't advanced far enough to be able to completely prohibit burning. And burning's really not all that bad of a thing if it's done properly.
He explained burning properly includes burning when the air index is right and burning debris continuously at a high temperature.
I don't have any clear cut answers and I don't think there's any one-size-fits-all solution. There's no universal answer, Hamilton noted.
Council did not commit to moving it forward at an accelerated pace at the May 23 meeting; instead, they chose to table the bylaw, asking staff to make further amendments to it, to be discussed at a future meeting.
The bylaw, as it is currently written, calls for a two-year phase-in period for the prohibition of land clearing burns and a two-year trial period allowing backyard burning to take place for a period of time each year in the fall.
