There have been fewer complaints lately when it comes to agricultural land in Delta being used as parking lots for big rigs.
That’s what Hugh Davies, the city’s property use and compliance manager, told the Optimist in response to the issue being raised by Metro Vancouver as an ongoing concern.
“It’s less of an issue today. Truck parking is always in demand and there’s limited areas to park, so there’s always a tendency to park anywhere you can and if you can find some space for commercial trucks on farmland, that’s what people will do. It’s more of an ALC (Agricultural Land Commission) issue and when we do see issues like that, we’ll let the ALC know and it’s up to them,” said Davies.
The city does enforce commercial trucks parked on roadways including areas such as Tilbury, Annacis Island and Nordel Court, where many vehicles were parking overnight.
Davies said the city managed to restrict that activity by enforcing a regulation not allowing overnight parking on roadways.
“What we found is that Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond and Surrey said no to overnight parking on the street and that meant they were coming to Delta, so we enforced that. At Annacis Island, the traffic went right down because there were no longer too many trucks going to Annacis that didn’t even belong there, so, truckers are aware where they can and can not go, but use whatever areas they can until we catch them or someone tells them it’s not appropriate to park there, but we haven’t been getting a lot of calls on that,” he added.
When it comes to trucks parking on agricultural lands, the issue was raised this summer at Metro Vancouver’s Regional Planning Committee.
“This has been an issue of concern for some time. To provide the Committee with additional background information on this issue, the Regional Industrial Lands Strategy Task Force considered this matter in 2019,” a report notes.
“While no specific direction or actions have been undertaken by Metro Vancouver staff on this since that time, during the preparation of the Regional Industrial Lands Strategy, and more recently with the development of Metro 2050, it was clearly stated by the MVRD Board that the intent is to protect the region’s agricultural lands for agricultural uses, not to accommodate vehicle parking or other competing land uses.”
The report also notes that the City of Surrey and its Agricultural Advisory Committee have considered the matter over the past eight years through various studies, strategies, and policies through the Truck Parking Task Force, and more recently in a Truck Parking Strategy Initiatives Update undertaken in January 2021.
