Publish the Growth CIP annual review

The short version

The Town’s Growth Community Improvement Plan already says an annual report should be produced. It does not say by when, and it does not say where residents can read it. This proposal asks council to fix those two things and nothing else.

It changes no grant. It changes no eligibility rule. It adds and removes not one dollar. It asks that the report the plan already contemplates gets written by a set date and posted where people can find it.

Why this one

The Growth CIP has drawn more public attention than most things the town does. It went through an open house, a council workshop, a statutory public meeting under sections 28 and 17 of the Planning Act, and written submissions from residents and builders.

The questions people raised were not small ones. Residents asked whether the cost of the incentives would be carried by existing taxpayers, and how the town would recover its upfront investment. They asked whether water and sanitary servicing could keep up with growth. They asked whether existing residents would get first priority on land sold below market value. Builders said the incentives as first drafted were too small to move a project forward and did not close the affordability gap.

Council listened to a good deal of it. The Per-Door Grant exists for exactly that reason. It was added as a fourth incentive in response to comments that the original three did not tackle affordability directly.

That interest did not end when the plan was adopted. People here are still talking about the CIP, still asking who has received what, and still asking whether it is doing what it was sold as doing. When residents engage with a program that seriously, the answers should not be hard to find. Right now they are.

What the plan already says

On January 14, 2025, council adopted the Growth Community Improvement Plan by By-law 2025-06, under section 28 of the Planning Act. By-law 2025-05 designated the Community Improvement Project Area. The plan contains four incentive programs: sale of land below market value (the $10 per lot program), the Tax Increment Equivalent Grant, the Planning and Building Permit Fee Grant, and the Per-Door Grant of up to $5,000 per dwelling unit created.

Section 4.0 says town staff will conduct periodic reviews of the programs to determine their effectiveness and provide an update to council, and that following the first year the town should evaluate the effectiveness of the application process, the evaluation process, and the staff resources required to run it.

It then recommends an annual report to council covering:

• number of applications;
• number and type of new residences constructed;
• increase in assessed value of participating properties;
• estimated and actual amount of grants provided;
• land developed or redeveloped;
• value of private sector investment leveraged;
• number of program defaults, and the reasons for them.

It further recommends a close-out evaluation for each finished project, and an application database used to work out which incentives are actually pulling their weight.

That is a good monitoring framework. Someone thought carefully about it. This proposal does not try to improve on it. It only asks two questions about it.

Every resident who has ever asked about the CIP is really asking one of those two things. Neither should be hard to answer, and today both are.

What is missing

Three words are doing all the damage.

“Should.” Section 4.0 says the annual report should be produced, and that the measures are recommended. Nothing obligates anyone to produce it.

No date. “Periodic” and “following the first year” are not deadlines. There is no month, no meeting, no trigger.

No publication. Even where the plan contemplates a report going to council, nothing says it gets posted anywhere a resident can find it, and nothing establishes a running record of approvals.

A recommendation with no deadline and no named owner is not a policy. It is a good intention, and good intentions lose to the agenda every single time.

This is not new, and it is not anyone’s fault

Substantially the same section 4.0 language, including the same annual report recommendation and the same list of measures, appeared in the town’s 2018 Community Improvement Plan adopted by By-law 1319-2018.

The closest documents to a review under that plan are two administrative reports, “Community Improvement Plan Applications, Review” in October 2021 and March 2022. Both open by listing the eleven incentive programs and then work through applications received. They are intake summaries. They are not evaluations of whether the programs worked.

So the town has carried a recommended annual CIP report in its planning documents for roughly eight years, across more than one council and more than one plan. No such report appears in the public record.

That is not a story about anyone being lazy, and I am not going to tell it that way. It is a story about what happens to a task that is recommended rather than required, with no date attached and nobody named to do it. The fix is not to find someone to blame. The fix is to write down a date.

On the current program year

The first program year under the Growth CIP ended January 14, 2026. Reading through published council agendas, minutes, and by-laws up to the July 14, 2026 regular meeting, I could not find an annual Growth CIP report or a program effectiveness review. What is there is application-by-application business: a March report establishing a first-come first-served process for the $10 lots, an April report recommending approval of application 09-2025.

I am not saying no review was done. It may exist as a standalone document, it may have been given verbally, it may sit in a committee package outside the agenda record. If it exists, I want to know, and I will say so here plainly and update this page.

But notice that the reason I cannot tell you either way is exactly the thing this proposal is about.

The information is already public

Every approved application is authorized by a by-law that names the registered owner, gives the address and legal description, states the number of residential units, and specifies the grant amounts. These by-laws are passed in open session and published in council agendas.

So publishing a consolidated record discloses nothing new. It changes only the effort required to see it. Today, a resident who wants to know the total committed under the Growth CIP has to open and read every agenda package and by-law issued since January 2025.

I tried it. The Growth CIP approvals from the first year are spread across eight separate authorizing by-laws, each attached to a different council meeting, plus the staff reports and minutes that go with them. Every piece is public. Nowhere is there a page that adds them up. To answer “how much has the town committed so far,” you have to find all of them first, and then satisfy yourself that you have actually found all of them, which is the part you cannot verify.

That is not evidence of anything being hidden. It is evidence that “technically public” and “actually available” are two different things.

Two limits belong in this, and they are in the draft below. Reporting is at the owner and applicant level only, nothing about tenants, purchasers, or occupants of assisted units. And where a staff report holds information properly withheld under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the published record carries only the by-law-level facts already in the public domain.

What this proposal does not do

Saying this plainly, because these are the objections that will come and none of them apply.

It does not end or sunset the program. No expiry, no automatic termination, no annual cliff. Council already holds that power under the plan’s own general conditions and does not need help from me to use it.

It does not condition funding on the report. Budget authority is untouched.

It does not change eligibility, grant amounts, or approval processes. Not one clause of the incentive programs.

It creates no risk for anyone building here. A builder partway through a six-year Tax Increment Equivalent Grant agreement is unaffected. Nothing here touches investment certainty, which is the entire purpose of the program.

The Growth CIP exists to make it easier to build housing in Cochrane. I want it to work. This is written so that it cannot make that harder.

The questions that need answering

Three things would settle most of this, and none of them require a study. Whether an annual Growth CIP report was prepared for the year ending January 14, 2026, and where it can be read. Whether any annual report was ever prepared under the 2018 plan. And whether the Growth CIP as adopted carries any term or expiry date, because I could not find one in the plan document.

These are ordinary questions, and under the proposal above nobody would have to ask them. The answers would already be published.

Tell me what you’d change

This is a discussion draft and I mean it. If a field in that table would create real work for staff without telling residents anything useful, I want to hear it, because a reporting rule that burns staff time for no public benefit is a bad rule. And if you think I have the CIP wrong, tell me that too. Write to me at dan4cochrane@gmail.com.