Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Cortes Community Housing Society have a number of updates to announce as they work towards having a town hall meeting for their Rainbow Ridge project.

“We're very much looking forward to having this town hall meeting, potentially near the end of October, but please stay tuned. We'll announce the date, the time, and the place as soon as we can get all the parties together and have all our documentation and designs ready to exhibit,”

said Executive Director, Sandra Wood.

“We've been waiting for the Ministry of Transportation (MOT) to approve our subdivision plan for more than a year. It's been a long process.”

The full service surveying and engineering firm J.E. Anderson was employed to design Rainbow Road, which will come into the housing project.

Miranda Cross, Project Director of the Dillon Creek Wetlands Restoration, designed their stormwater management plan. She came up with a plan of bioswales, ponds and creeks to help capture the stormwater coming off Rainbow Ridge. The nutrients, like the nitrogen and phosphorus, will be absorbed by plants and the soil.

“Building on that preliminary work that Miranda provided us with in 2020 and 2021, we have now hired a company called Kinship to take it to the next level. They are still working with our engineers at J.E. Anderson, to adapt the routing of the water to accommodate the new layout of the townhouses. We've moved them in different positions on the property. So the site plan has changed and therefore the routing of the stormwater has changed. That's the piece that Kinship is now working on and building on Miranda's original framework,” explained Wood.

The Cortes Community Housing Society has drawn up a covenant to do any final finishing work, so that the new occupants of Rainbow Ridge will not have to wait for everything to be 100% completed before moving in.

While the society has to pay for the road into Rainbow Ridge, MOT will maintain it in the future.

Iredale & Associates was hired to reduce development costs.

“In rural BC, and especially on these islands, there's no public water system to plug into. There's no public sewer system to plug into. Not only that, but you have to build your own roads on your own property. So that's what we're faced with on Cortes Island, and that obviously is a huge expense for our community to provide infrastructure for Rainbow Ridge.”

Iredale is working with the contours of the land, to position the future town homes so that they nestle more naturally into the land. This eliminates the need to spend a lot of money moving soil around for foundations and buildings.

“Our main focus over this past year is finding ways to more inexpensively locate the parking lots, driveways and the houses, including all of the infrastructure, like the sewer, water, and the power that has to get to each of those buildings.”

After this is completed, the new site layout and plans for the townhouses will be unveiled in a town hall meeting.