Five Years, $16,700, and an Unfinished Plan

Hornby Island's Local Trust Committee chartered a comprehensive OCP/LUB review to fix housing and short-term-rental rules, set a $16,700 two-year budget and a spring 2024 adoption target — then documented, in its own staff reports, a failed first engagement, a nearly exhausted budget, and a project still unfinished in 2026. Meanwhile, a rezoning file sat deferred for roughly three years awaiting the same unresolved planning question, and the affordable housing that did arrive on Hornby was financed and delivered by agencies outside the Trust.

On paper, Hornby Island's planning priorities were settled years ago. In 2022 the Hornby Island Local Trust Committee endorsed a project charter for a "Comprehensive OCP/LUB Review" — identified as a top-priority project — to update the island's rules on housing, short-term vacation rentals (STVRs), First Nations acknowledgments and riparian areas, building on Advisory Planning Commission work that occupied much of 2021 and early 2022.^[1] The charter's workplan was explicit: adoption of the amended bylaws by spring 2024.^[1]

The budget attached to that mandate, spread across two fiscal years, totalled $16,700 — consultant contracts, venue rental, advertising and a minute-taker included.^[1]

By January 2023, the project's own paper trail read like a warning label. The consultant's memo reported: "Due to additional work and research completed by the consultant, the budget is currently 57.5% spent, leaving $5,725 remaining to complete this project."^[1] Staff were equally frank about the sole public event held so far: "The first consultation event which took place in October was not seen as successful by organizers or participants and as such it is recommended by the consultant and staff that revised approach to the project be considered at this time."^[1] The revised approach narrowed the second engagement to STVRs only and deferred the remaining deliverables to the next fiscal year, contingent on new funding.^[1]

In 2026, the review is still listed among Hornby's current projects on the Trust's own website — roughly five years after the Advisory Planning Commission began the work in 2021, and more than two years past the charter's spring 2024 adoption target.^[2][1]

Delay of this kind is not abstract. On April 27, 2018, the LTC resolved: "That the Hornby Island Local Trust Committee defer consideration of rezoning application HO-RZ-2018.1 until issues regarding the Official Community Plan and Land Use Bylaw Minimum Average Lot Area inconsistencies are resolved."^[3] By September 2019 — with the lot-area question then not expected to be considered until spring 2020 under the project's revised charter — staff wrote that "No new information has been received from the applicant since deferral of the application" and recommended denial.^[3] In March 2020 the file remained open, with staff recommending biological and hydrogeological studies before any decision.^[3] The application was finally denied on January 29, 2021, by unanimous vote after a well-attended virtual public hearing — roughly three years after the original deferral.^[4]

Meanwhile, the bill rises. The Trust's 2026/27 budget includes "an 8.1% increase to the existing local trust area tax base plus an additional 0.8% tax revenue expected from new construction and development," with the average residential owner in the Trust Area (excluding Bowen Island Municipality) paying $465–470 in Islands Trust property tax in 2026.^[5] CHEK News reported the budget grew by $1.5 million to cover expiring grant revenue; Trust director Julia Mobbs acknowledged that larger grants "have been used to offset operational spending with the view of helping in the short term to reduce the tax increase."^[6]

And on the crisis the review was chartered to address, Trust Council itself "has declared that a housing equity and workforce shortage crisis exists on many of the islands within the Islands Trust Area."^[7] The concrete relief that arrived on Hornby — the 26-unit Beulah Creek Village rental project, with more than $16 million in combined federal, provincial and regional funding — was financed and delivered by CMHC, BC Housing, the Comox Valley Regional District, M'akola Housing Society and the Hornby Island Housing Society, with move-in beginning late May 2026.^[8] The Trust's own affordable-housing toolkit centres on housing agreements — legal conditions attached to projects — not funding or delivery.^[7]

What cuts the other way deserves saying plainly. The four-topic mandate was genuinely hard, and the consultant reported that at the October 2022 session "the conversation was dominated by several individuals," with dozens of follow-up emails arriving outside the contracted scope.^[1] The token budget was a Trust Council allocation as much as an LTC failure, and the LTC responded by endorsing a revised business case rather than abandoning the project.^[1] On HO-RZ-2018.1, staff had flagged groundwater and habitat concerns, and trustee Alex Allen framed the unanimous denial as responsive government: "this is a time where democracy is speaking out."^[4]

But that is precisely the point. Nobody disputes that Hornby's issues are hard. The record shows an institution that named its own priorities, wrote its own deadlines, set its own budget — and then documented, in its own reports, that it met none of them.