Planning continues for Garibaldi at Squamish
Catch up with the latest on the all-season resort project slated for Brohm Ridge
Jennifer Thuncher / Squamish Chief
AUGUST 19, 2020 03:26 PM
While things may seem quiet where the all-season resort Garibaldi at Squamish is concerned, behind the scenes things are moving forward, albeit slowly.
To recap, the resort slated for the Brohm Ridge slopes of Mount Garibaldi will include 130 ski and snowboard trails, 21 lifts, and a network of multi-use trails.
At build-out, the resort could accommodate 15,000 skiers in winter and about 14,000 guests in the summer."This would equate to an annual skier visitor count of approximately 995,000, with an average daily demand of 7,000 visitors during the peak winter season and additional visitors during the summer," reads the project's Transportation Concept document.
(These above numbers come from the project's draft Master Plan and are repeated in the document.)
Photo: PWL LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS/GARIBALDI AT SQUAMISH
Recent happenings
The project, being developed by Aquilini Development and Northland Properties, applied to the provincial Environmental Assessment Office to extend the Environmental Assessment Certificate that was issued to Garibaldi at Squamish Inc. in January of 2016.
The new application, which was accepted and posted to the EAO website in early July, was to extend the entire certificate by five years.
"Project development has not advanced as quickly as initially planned, due to challenges encountered in attempts by Garibaldi to reach agreement-in-principle with local government before submitting a master plan to the Mountain Resorts Branch of the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations," reads the application.
"We gave them a number of drafts and they actually advise changes they want to see," said Sabina FooFat, Garibaldi at Squamish's project director regarding the EAO extension application process.
The project has also asked to amend the timing of requirements of some conditions of the Environmental Assessment Certificate.
"Our request is to remove the specific fixed deadline for these conditions to allow for sufficient time to complete fulsome and thorough on-mountain investigation, before moving to implement the Paradise Valley water system from the Cheakamus Aquifer," reads the EAO application.
FooFat said that the design team is focusing on getting water for the resort from the mountain, rather than from Paradise Valley, an early plan which has been a sore spot for many residents there.
One month after the original EA certificate was issued in 2016, the provincial government introduced the Water Sustainability Act and that act regulates any commercial industrial access to water to ensure that the usage doesn't detrimentally impact the environment, FooFat said.
FooFat said a lot of the work in the EA certificate the project was pursuing overlaps with the Act.
"That is one example of what the EAO will look at to determine if the new legislation impacts the certificate when they extend it."
Three 2016 EA conditions required that the proponents go into Paradise Valley and drill six test wells and confirm the location of the potential main pumping well before January 2021.
"We talked to the EAO office and said we really want to pursue research into on-mountain water, but because the certificate was written so there is a hard deadline for those conditions, we would like to amend the timing."
They are asking that the Paradise Valley requirements not have a deadline at all, as they may not need to do them in the end, she said.
"Say that we are successful in our search for on-mountain water. The EAO condition is written so that we would have to put test wells and drill wells in the Paradise Valley, regardless. And what we are saying is if we don't have to do that work, if we are not withdrawing from the Paradise Valley, we don't want to disturb the Paradise Valley," she said.
"We definitely have a preference to pursue on-mountain water, it makes a lot of sense," she added, but it requires 12 months of data.
Asked why the work hadn't been done in previous years, FooFat said there were plans to drill at the mountain site last winter, but an early snowfall made it impossible.
The on-mountain concept also didn't surface as a possible priority of the project until 2018, she said.
The EAO office is reviewing the applications.
The existing EAO certificate expires in January, so FooFat hopes to hear back from the office regarding the applications by December, she said.