 So really, the Ministry has infrastructure and transportation. We have a lot of different divisions and development approvals being one of them. A lot of people don't know we exist until they have to deal with us and we undertake a lot of various things for the Ministry. So I'm hoping I can sort of let you know about how and why we go through those processes and a few tips for getting through a select series of them. So starting off, I got to sort of start at the beginning here and kind of explain how our structure works and staffing is broken down. And then you'll see later it helps you out in trying to figure out exactly who you need to contact because there is a lot of us in the province. There's over 100 dev techs through the province. And so this is how the Ministry of Transportation is just broken down at a base level. We have three primary regions, being the south coast, the southern interior and the northern region. And each region is broken down into different districts. Now just reading off the screen here, each region has a regional office. It's pretty self-explanatory. However, just to confuse you right off the bat, a regional office may also be a district office. Districts are broken down into smaller service areas. Each service area will often have a local area office. And the day-to-day decision-making that you'll most likely engage in with ministry staff is through these district offices in our local areas. So an example of this, easy because I work here is Vancouver Island. We are District 2 of the south coast region, and we have three distinct service areas within our island, being Nanaimo, Courtney, and Victoria. So we have three separate, what we call as district sort of service area offices on the island. And then Nanaimo office doubles as our regional staff office as well. The ministry headquarters is located downtown Victoria, but it's not very typical when you're dealing with development approvals, technicians that they'll have any interaction with headquarters staff on the majority of those applications. Our headquarters staff primarily assist in things such as policy and developing things behind the scenes. Like it says on the slide, the majority of decision-making you'll be doing is through the techs in these very local area offices. So knowing who to talk to can be very important. So this slide's intended to show that the development approvals technician is part of a much larger team and system of people, and that the development approvals technician is supported by other positions. Ops techs are clerical and works collaboratively with positions across the ministry and across the district, and in sort of pretend air quotes works for certain positions. Now a DevTex going to have an assigned supervisor, so they don't really work for anyone except for that supervisor, but we do have kind of loose reporting structures where development approvals technician supplies reports to various other positions, and we'll get into that later. So on your screen the district staff listed there, that's sort of a typical district staff list for an entire district. So again we'll use the example of Vancouver Island. We have one district manager who oversees the entire island. We have one operations manager per office, and they're generally sort of referred to as the office manager, and often the development approvals technician's supervisor. We generally have one provincial approving officer per district. District engineers, a senior technician, and now in the districts, and I understand that there's people watching and listening from across the province. One thing to bear in mind here is that every district is unique and different. They all have different operational needs and staffing levels. Some of these positions may not be there in your specific area. The senior development approvals technician is kind of a sketchy one in that regards in that some districts have one, and they are the supervisor for all the development approval staff who you would be dealing with. Some districts have none. Some districts have one per office. So again, you really need to get to know your very local office. Road area managers, bridge managers, they are specific to our operations department, and development approvals technicians work with them all the time. Then we have clerical staff in other various operational positions through the ministry. One thing I did neglect to leave off the slide I just thought of now as I saw one walk by is that commercial vehicle safety enforcement staff, CVSE, are part of the ministry. You probably see them driving around on the highway from time to time in their vehicles that look much like cop cars, but they're not. These staff do work with the CVSE officers as kind of our arm of the law, so to say, if we need to dispatch them to look at things like illegal industrial activities and bad practices by commercial drivers and dump truck drivers. As I had mentioned, the development approvals technician will generally report to a senior tech or an ops manager, so just for your information if you ever need to go up the chain, so to speak. Like I mentioned, this is a simplified list. One big example being engineers. A lot of districts no longer have district engineers, and all of our engineering services are now provided to the ministry staff through regional and provincial engineering groups. Knowing the staff breakdowns of your specific office and district you work with normally can greatly help you to understand your weight and turnaround times. One of the big normal complaints we get is government takes too long, and it's always helpful for people to understand that if the tech that you dropped off your plan to has to mail it to a city half the province away for review, that's one of those things that leads to that, so if you know the reporting structure that your staff member is working with, it can give you an idea of the time difference. That gives you kind of a breakdown of the ministry and our staff and everything like that, so we're going to get into how and why we do what we do now. So one of the big considerations that development approvals works with every day is this idea of the controlled access highway. Now these are special highways, and I should pull back a second. Anytime I mention highway or road, they basically mean the same thing. We choose to think of a highway as say Trans-Canada Highway 1, a big four six lane highway with overpasses, but the base definition for your everyday road is also highway as well, just to confuse everyone again. So controlled access highway is specifically designated under section 48 of the Transportation Act, and for just ease of reference for people here, I'm going to not show these specific sections of the Transportation Act. You can quickly Google it. If you just Google BC Transportation Act, you can bring it up in a nice searchable format and any other legislation that I mentioned is very quick to get that way as well. So these highways are designated to accommodate traffic flows rather than access to a greater degree than other highways. The ministry has the authority to restrict and limit access to these designated highways at our will, and generally a numbered provincial highway is a controlled access highway. So this is, I put generally there because this is just a good rule of thumb. If you're driving down a road and there's a nice sign with a number on it, chances are it's a controlled access highway, but not all controlled access highways are numbered and not all numbered highways are controlled access through all of them. Again, you need to know who you're working with in the local district and they'll be able to give you that specific information if need be for your development or whatever you're working on. So not all highways through and roads through the province are created or treated equally. The majority of community linking routes through the province are restricted by the ministry. This is primarily through the Transportation Act mentioned in the slide. There are instances where a numbered provincial route, like I mentioned, is not designated or controlled access. An example of this is Highway 14 as you go to Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. The entire highway is not designated controlled access, the load is a numbered route. Beyond allowing the ministry to restrict access and works on these routes, the controlled access highway designation directly impacts local government processes. That includes municipalities and regional districts. So, how do we control it? The controlled area, now this is also through legislation as well. The controlled area is the space where the ministry must and I've bolded an underlined must on my screen here, so as a must, approve local government processes such as re-zonings and development permits. Standard practice is for a government to refer, or local government, to refer the proposal to the appropriate ministry office for review and comments ahead of wanting to immediately enact that item. Those comments and any requirements stipulated by the ministry are then generally made part of the local government's approval process. One important thing to note here is it can be very mutually beneficial for the ministry and local governments to work cooperatively on projects outside of the controlled area if significant impact to a provincial highway can be expected. So if you have a large commercial development, for instance, or a large residential development occurring just outside that controlled area, but you're pretty sure that it's going to clog up the highway, you will probably want to work with your local highway's office to create some kind of plan or future network plan that can then hopefully one day alleviate those traffic concerns once the development is built out. So, not all proposals within the controlled area will have additional requirements from the ministry. This isn't supposed to be like a scary thing. It's very common day-to-day for items within this controlled area to be sent to our district offices and then there's no additional comments whatsoever. We're not always looking to shut down accesses or have people or developers or local governments create intersections and other infrastructure like that. We do review each one on a case-by-case basis unless there's some kind of overarching agreement with a municipality and we try to be reasonable and fair while still protecting the provincial link between these communities and the provincial investment. So just a quick surveying thing to help us out here is this idea of a public road dedication and this ties directly with items like the controlled area and controlled access highways. So right away I'm going to say that this is commonly referred to as right-of-way instead of actually calling it by its real name of a provincial public highway or public road dedication. The term right-of-way actually specifically refers to some other things so I'm not going to be referring to it as right-of-way if I ever bring it up. I'm going to be referring to it as a dedication. So the image displays the surveyed parcels and road dedications around the uptown development near Victoria. Three of these roads are managed by the ministry. Trans Canada Highway 1, Blanchard Street which is Highway 17, and Reveen Way sort of in the top right-hand corner. The remaining road dedications as they are not designated controlled access or arterial highways fall under the management of the local municipality in this case the municipality of Saanich. Typical rule of thumb is any provincial highway will be in the jurisdiction of the ministry regardless of the municipalities that they pass through. There are other situations where the ministry retains management of a road if you're ever unsure like I said check with your local office or development approvals technician and we have lists and quick maps that can tell you yes that roads hours or no it belongs to municipality X, Y, or Z. We need to note here that all the road dedications outside of municipalities so when we're dealing with unincorporated areas within regional districts all public roads are the ministry's responsibility unless they're created for private purposes such as Stratter Road. Road dedications are not standard titled property. They actually have no title and therefore they cannot have charges against them such as an easement or right of way. This is why the ministry and anyone else who manages road dedications have a permitting process that allow a person or corporation or agency or local government to occupy or work within those surveyed road dedications. All right so now we actually get to development approvals. Development approvals arm of the ministry responsible for processing reviewing and completion permits approvals and subdivisions along with many other things were guided by a wide range of legislation including but not limited to the Transportation Act and the Land Title Act and the DevTec also assists the public and local governments and other agencies with a variety of items and that's an important part I would like to think that we're not just doing things for people who drop off applications. A lot of time spent by DevTecs is with local governments, the public professionals, various corporations and other companies just answering questions and providing information. There's no charges for almost all of our processes that we might do. If you need to come into a highway's office and ask for a plan or ask for some advice that's all free and our DevTecs are happy to do it. I do want to point out that DevTecs are generally assigned to specific areas. It's usually organized by geography or boundaries of a local government. And so that technician assigned to your area is going to be responsible for everything that happens there. This is why it's important to get to know that technician being him or her because they're going to be the quote unquote expert on everything that happens in that area. For an example, we'll use my case. I'm assigned to the geographic area of the Capital Regional District here on Vancouver Island. So I receive the applications for all unincorporated areas and municipalities within the CRD's boundaries. And that's important for the staff of those organizations and all the companies that work in within the CRD's limits. They know that they can come to me and find the information that they're looking for. That system can become a little bit of a problem if I happen to be sick or away on vacation. So some offices who have a larger amount of staff like to use the case where they'll share everything. There'll be a literal pile of work in the middle of their workspace. And each technician, when they're ready for something new, takes something off the top of that pile. Now, in that case, you don't really get the expertise in an area as different people are going to be working throughout the service area. But it's a lot more fair and you're more likely to be able to contact someone in the case of illness or long vacations and stuff like that. So when do you need to apply to the ministry? Now, I'm going to say right off the bat, this list is pared down a lot. There's a lot of very specific instances where you're going to need or not do things, but leave those up to specific discussions with the dev techs in your area. This is just a general sort of idea. So we like to break down development approvals into three specific areas. You have approvals, subdivisions and permits. So if we start at the top, approvals include any items that don't fit under permits or subdivisions. So this is local government processes that affect parcels of land within the controlled area, the release of legal agreements, covenants, easements, right of ways where the ministry is a party. It includes things such as road closures. The biggest section of development approvals most likely is the subdivisions. And I've broken that into two sort of distinct spots because we have subdivisions within municipalities and subdivisions obviously outside of municipalities. Those would be the ones in these unincorporated areas where a local government is a regional district. So any proposal that will subdivide a parcel of land immediately adjacent to a survey dedication of a controlled access highway must be sent to the ministry. The municipality has no choice in this option because the ministry's provincial approving officer is going to need to sign that plan because of various legislation. If by any chance you're in a municipality, we're talking about a piece of land really far away from the highway, but the municipal approving officer would still like to waive certain requirements such as access to water. The ministry of transportation approving officer may be required to approve that and so you'll be dealing with a development approvals technician through that process as well. For subdivisions outside of municipalities, I've left this really general because you could spend weeks or months talking about the subdivision process, but generally speaking, any subdivision that requires approval under the Land Title Act must go to your local office for review and processing. And then we get to permits. So any plan construction work within a road dedication managed by the ministry will require a permit. This includes items like access permits, construction work, installation of utilities. There's a lot of things that go under permits. So for permits, the ministry is considered the property owner of the dedicated public highway under its jurisdiction. Since it cannot be encumbered with charges like easements and right-of-ways, permits are necessary to provide approval for use as a private landowner. Permits do not have any fees associated with them, but the applicant is required to complete all construction requirements. And that's an important part to remember here. A lot of people will come in and submit their permits thinking that they can go do the work. Please have conversations with your local DevTex if you're considering significant construction projects because the costs will be solely bared by the applicants, which could be the company doing the work or the developer or anyone really. And some of those costs can get quite high in today's road construction world. Some developments could require an application under all three streams in the screen there. A rezoning referral can come from a local government, and that can lead to a subdivision. That subdivision may require an access permit or construction of an access, and that leads to needing a permit. And in our system, just for your reference, all of these files will be cross referenced together for future inquiries. One thing I would like to mention about subdivisions are there are fees involved with subdivisions. Those fees are outlined on our website, and so they're available ahead of time. There is some confusion with them from time to time. Again, any questions, contact your local office. So we're going to get into the approval section now of development approvals. Now, and so by approval, I mean the ministry approving the process of a local government. So be that a municipality or a regional district is basically the same. There's not a lot of difference in either case. So this is just a handy little sort of flow chart to follow in what our municipal bylaw approval process looks like. So at the start, you have a municipality that submits the referral to the ministry, and that referral doesn't have to be in a very official paper copies or anything like that. It can be as simple as an email with a plan attached to it. We've seen everything. Faxes aren't generally encouraged because the quality is not so good. But email, letter, drop it off by a hand, discuss it over coffee, any kind of referral that we can realistically log into our system will do. So after it's received in our office and given to the development approvals technician who will handle it, they start a file in our system. Now off to the side there, I've got a few little circles, a few little blips for people that may be involved in the DevTex review of that file. Engineers, operations, staff, or if the tech doesn't feel comfortable or they need some assistance, they can always go to the senior development approvals tech, or if they need even more assistance, go to provincial approving officer to help them out. The DevTex will then provide a response to the municipality and that response can be a lot of different things. I have three sort of very simplistic kind of answers there. Approval or requirements for approval, non-approval with reasons for the decision, or a simple request for more information. The vast majority of municipal processes that we get for referrals, they just go back as a simple approval, no need for anything else. The technician is reviewing to protect the highway integrity in the highway system. So you do have the off chance that some requirements might come back and the municipality or the regional district doesn't have much of a choice other than to inform the applicant that the ministry has come up with these requirements. Everything can be looked at and everything can be reviewed. Nothing's ever set in stone as far as our processes go. If the DevTex asks for something for your municipal process and you disagree with it, you are free to contact that staff member back through our established reconsideration process and we can look at it and see, okay, you know what, given this new information, our requirement was unreasonable or unfair and we can lighten up on it a little bit. So here's just a list of some typical bylaw requirements that the ministry may request of a local government in order to approve the bylaw that they're trying to enact. Some kind of big ticket items would be access or construction and that could be anything from the creation of a single driveway all the way to creation of a large interchange or intersection with lights and street lights and all that good stuff. Legal agreements restricting use or construction. This one's probably a little bit more common where the ministry is going to require a covenant which is just a legal agreement for people who might not know what that relates to which restricts building on a parcel or use of a parcel and can be used to allow the process to complete prior to construction works being done. This is a really great one that we've gotten used to here on the island is you can get through the bylaw process with these covenants in place and you can still rezone your property without doing any work. Of course you can't build a house on it or build anything on it because of the covenant but at least you can get through the rezoning process and try to recoup some costs and build that bankroll back up to get you to the point of construction. You have road construction or improvements to existing road network and these would be the expensive ones when you're dealing with existing highways and existing roads and you have your traffic impact assessments. These are very specialized engineering reports created by professional traffic engineers. From time to time the ministry is going to request these and they must be provided. They'll be reviewed by our staff and the recommendations in those reports will be considered to go towards conditions of any of the above. So we're going to jump into subdivision approvals. Now like I mentioned before this is a huge topic and this is going to be very brief and not specific. So through the various legislation the Ministry of Transportation is responsible for the review and approval of subdivision applications adjacent to controlled access highways and within unincorporated areas across BC. So to give you a quick run down of the phases of subdivision review that we typically undertake start off with the application being made to the staff then the ministry staff in charge of your file is going to send a referral out to any agencies that they feel are affected or could have an interest in the subdivision. They will also review the file just to make sure everything's there as far as a paper standpoint goes and they'll perform an onsite inspection which you do not necessarily have to be present for. Some technicians like to have the developer or property owner or applicant onsite with them for the inspection but it's not actually necessary. After that let's just say everything went well in our imaginary case and the preliminary report is then completed by the DevTec and submitted to the Provincial Approving Officer for review. If the Provincial Approving Officer agrees with the report as submitted the tech will then create a preliminary approval letter or a preliminary non-approval letter and that's sent out to the applicant. So that's your preliminary spot. This is a very important step in the process because a preliminary approval letter will allow a landowner or developer or agent to market those lots that they have planned to create. If a non-approval letter does not allow for the marketing and that's pretty sure encoded somewhere in the BC real estate act whatever that might be called. After that there's this very sort of fuzzy gray phase called the final submission. Now after receiving the preliminary approval and in between getting your plan signed at the end of the day there's a lot of different things that could go into it but you will be required to drop off a very formal final submission to the staff. Just like the original application the staff member will review your final make sure that everything's there from a paper point of view and the fees are being paid and they will provide another submission to the provincial approving officer. This is the provincial approving officer's sort of big stage here. This is where they decide to sign that final survey plan or not. If it's signed it'll be returned to you as soon as possible in an electronic and the original copy format by the district staff. If your final subdivision plan is not signed the provincial approving officer will provide or must provide you with reasons for not signing that and like everything else that we do this is all up for negotiation and discussion through any point in this process. So just because we say no doesn't actually always mean no. A lot of things can be worked around. I mean the old adage money can buy anything in subdivisions that can be true as well but we like with our other files we try to be reasonable and responsible to not only the province but also to the applicants including the developers and property owners. So moving on in subdivisions just going to briefly talk about subdivisions within a municipality because these are treated slightly different. So subdivisions within a municipality are primarily reviewed from the perspective of access and impact on the existing provincial highway networks. You still have to meet all Land Title Act requirements but often in the municipal setting these have been provided for by the municipality themselves. This includes things such as access to potable water and sewage disposal. Proposals must meet all requirements of both the ministry and the municipality. That one's important because if a municipality just submits a final survey plan to our offices it's probably going to hold up your process. The best advice that I can give in that case is to go through both streams at the same time to ensure that you don't miss anything and that you know what the ministry and the municipality are going to require. Often an applicant will make an application to the municipality first and the municipality will provide a referral to the ministry as an official contact and provide all the details of the subdivision and the plan and everything like that. That's generally where we create our file. The nice thing about municipal subdivisions is there are no fees associated with them since we assume those are taken by the city. The municipality will often act on your behalf once the application is made to us. Discussions regarding the proposal may occur between the ministry and municipal staff and those discussions may or may not include the applicant. Just something to be aware of that the ministry staff and the local government staff do work closely together often in most cases and if you're a developer out there yes there may be some meetings occurring between the two staff that you're not party to just for us to discuss our internal operational needs in reference to your subdivision. If anything would come out of that meeting for requirements on the subdivision or any problems those would obviously be communicated to the applicant. So subdivision tips and so this is just a quick list that I made up myself. Don't hold me to this or send me hate mail if it doesn't work for you or something like that but here we go. So here's some best practices to help you in your subdivision applications in the future. The more information you provide in the submission the faster the process can go. If you give us everything we don't have to do much. If you give us nothing and we have to do everything it's going to take longer for your submission to get process just by the virtue that the tech has to create a bunch of extra documents. Placing survey stakes or ribbons in the field to visually mark lock corners, accesses, right-of-ways and all that other good stuff can greatly aid the dev tech during their site inspection. It's very difficult to go out into the middle of a forest and identify the individual lots or proposed building sites. I've been there I've done it it's not nice it's not fun but if your surveyor was kind and he left a nice little white survey post out there for you to tell where you are it can go a long way to really helping the dev tech understand your lot in the real world. This one I think is a big one it's leave some wiggle room in your proposed lot areas to allow for possible ministry requirements such as road dedications drainage right-of-ways or returning water bodies to the crown. That last one is a big one that can throw some people off and this is a survey or requirement they go through the process of determining that during the time of final survey you might have to return a body of water on your property to the government depending on its size and a lot of people don't account for that in their proposed lot sizes. When all of a sudden that creek that goes through part of lot four or plan there to the side has to get returned to the crown maybe his lot isn't big enough to meet zoning anymore. So just another little thing to keep in the back of your mind. Always ensure that your proposal will meet local government zoning. Subdivision servicing bylaws developing permit guidelines and other relevant legislation before applying. The ministry will most likely and by most likely I mean almost never approve your subdivision if the proposed lots do not meet the local government zoning. It is a big big item to make sure that you're checking off your list before applying to us. Mostly because we don't want to take your money and then give you a non-approval. We just don't work that way we're not into to scrape together $700 at a time here. If we feel that there is no chance for your subdivision to get approved we don't like to accept the application. Be prepared in your budget to allow for new road construction or existing road improvements. If you're doing five lots or more I really hope you budgeted in your development there to build road. Many private property owners choose to use a third-party company as an agent who will handle their subdivision application process. If you're thinking of subdividing or developing a property and you don't know what you're doing it can be done. We help out a lot of people every day that don't have experience in this sort of thing. That's fine it does make the process a little longer and they might get blindsided by a few things. It's perfectly all right to hire someone as an agent act on your path in any sort of development. And the last big one submit a detailed survey plan for the proposal. Drawing something on a napkin and in pencil and dropping it off or faxing something to us isn't always going to cut it. We need to know details on the lots that you're proposing and what's there in the real world as well. So moving on from subdivisions into the last sort of stream of development approvals we have permits. And in the image there that is page one of the provincial public highway permit application. It's a very long name. We could have just called it permit application but it is specific to province of BC and for public highway use. This is the form that you must fill out page one of anyways when you're submitting a permit application to the government or to your local office. So the use of a public road dedication managed by the ministry requires a permit issued by a development approvals technician. There are various permit types including accesses utility installations and that's above and below ground. Use of a highway for a special event structure encroachment signs and the list goes on and on all those checkboxes in the image there. Those are all the different sort of basic permit types. You see there's quite a few. We like to separate them out because we have some distinct conditions for each specific one but to be honest if what you're planning on doing doesn't fit into one of those boxes or fits into multiples it's not really a big deal. It's just there to sort of help out the applicant. Permit forms are available in all of our offices in paper form. They're available from our website where you can contact your local development approvals technician and they can email you a PDF that you can use as many times as you want. Permits can be submitted the same sort of way in any way you feel suitable. They can be dropped off in person they can be mailed. I do not recommend faxing but they can be faxed. They can be scanned and emailed back to the development approval technician and I don't think we have any forms of permits that require a fee as well so that's also a good thing. When it comes to permit important here to remember that as the land owner the ministry has the ultimate authority when it comes to approving or not approving your permit and outlining the conditions of that approval. So the big one that most people are dealing with from a development or a local government point of view is access. So we have a few different types of accesses commercial use industrial use residential and sort of other residential and I've listed their accesses that will require a permit. Commercial and industrial are going to be always. Recently I believe probably about eight or ten years ago our residential use driveway permitting process changed where we no longer require permits for individual residential use driveways to non numbered highways. So if you have a single piece of property on what you could call a quote unquote side road and you want to build a single driveway to that house you're allowed to do that now without a permit. We do have guidelines for that available online and available from your offices but we've taken that permitting structure out. And so now if you're doing a residential use you're only going to require a permit if you're trying to connect to a controlled access highway or developing a shared or multi-use driveway and an example like that would be a strata development where you have 10 houses 10 lots using a single driveway connection to a road that's going to require a permit. So for highways which have been designated as controlled access highway you must submit a controlled access permit. The ministry developed a controlled access permit process so that we could specifically protect public investments on these roads and the major transportation networks by preserving its traffic carrying capacity and minimizing hazardous traffic conditions arising out of the location and use of these accesses. This is why I mentioned that the ministry has the ultimate authority in this land sort of ownership deal here. When you're dealing with requiring or requesting access to a controlled access highway you need to be prepared for the ministry to possibly say no for the reasons which I just mentioned which is minimizing hazardous traffic conditions and protecting public investment and preserving traffic carrying capacity. You may also be asked to revise your proposal as well. In all cases, alternate access for the proposed development will be required where secondary street system exists rather than allowing direct access to the controlled access highway. That's another very important part. If you are applying to the ministry to get your second or third driveway connection to a highway especially and you already have a few other driveway connections or access to a local road there's a good chance the ministry might say no and that's a policy and through the planning and designing access to development manual sort of guideline where the use of these numbered highways is for a very specific thing and that's carrying capacity of roads and not for a lot of individual accesses on them. Do we have parts of the province where there are a lot of permitted accesses on controlled highways? Yes, we do. Do we have other areas like highway one through the lower main line where there's none? Yes, we have that as well. So the two extremes which we try to go somewhere in the middle of those often when especially dealing with rural areas but again please, please, please check with your local office and the staff in them because different areas have different requirements. So jump over to some permitting tips. Again, this is just my quick list. So some best practices when dealing with permitted applications flagging or marking proposed accesses in the field can easily allow the DevTech to review your and I bolded your proposed location there on purpose. Just like with subdivisions if you're asking a DevTech to walk out into the middle of the forest or a long stretch of highway through a heavily forested area if you want your access in a location show us where you want it. That's perfectly acceptable and actually preferred by everyone. That way you take the guessing work out of the situation by the DevTech to go out there and try to look at a paper plan and relate that to some place on the ground. All technician specifications for road access and structure construction is available online in PDF formats. So Google is your friend in this case. If you're thinking about building something and you know you're going to need to construct within the ministry right of way everything we could possibly ask you to do is located in PDF documents available online. Also any engineering type works where you're required to retain the services of an engineer they have access to all of the possible information ahead of time as well. And actually that sentence should have said all technical specifications not technician. The cheapest option will not always be your best option. It's almost always the worst option. You will be responsible for any works for up to one year or more and will be required to replace any works that fail within the stipulated time frame. Just because you dug a trench you filled it back up and repaved it you're not good to go in most cases. The ministry can and does and will come back on people if that installation fails or causes damage to any other highway structures. And that's just something to be wary of not trying to be the big bad government again. But it's very important when you think from the subject that we're dealing with taxpayer dollars. And if a utility installation goes in and they don't do a good job of replacing it really it's and personal point of view here just not fair to ding the taxpayers of BC to fix that problem. We're going to come back on the installer and make them redo it. So if you do it right the first time you're probably going to save money in the long run. So Edas what does that stand for electronic development approval system. I wanted to show everyone this and this the photo or screen capture there on the right that this is the electronic filing system that all dev techs use. So development approval staff throughout the province all use this one same system to track all of our files. Now the important part about this is that this system is available outside of the ministry to the public and that can be public public anyone from anywhere in the province can be professional municipality local government and agency anything. You can request a BC EID and that's available I think for free online to get an account that lets you log into the system and submit applications. The ability to submit the application lets you also continue through the process. You're linked to your file in the system as an applicant and you can see the process unfolding as the dev tech goes through the steps in this sort of now I'm hoping you can see my mouse on the screen but through this task list that I'm circling around here you can watch that grow and be compiled as the dev tech works through the file and you can also see all the documents that are attached to it and get updates when something new is done on it. It also lets you track it if for and we all know that this never happens that if your local dev tech is taking too long to work on it you can see hey we submitted this on in this case August 13th why haven't you worked on it yet Ryan and I can tell you that I've been very busy and I'll get to it soon but just another thing from a customer service standpoint that we want our processes here to be open to everyone and transparent. So I can spend a lot of time just talking about edas but I won't just wanted to let everyone get an idea that it's consistent across the entire province and every single dev tech is using the same system it's set up to allow ministry staff to send these tasks to other people for instance in this file being a subdivision and me being the dev tech I'm required to submit my report to Kirsten who is our provincial proving officer here on the island that I'm acting for currently I can send that report to her through this edas system instead of having to send her an email or a letter or anything like that to greatly speed up the process and like I said before allow the applicant to track it if they want to. So last sort of slide here just to kind of wrap this up and I hope what I got through here is that communication and cooperation are the keys and this isn't just communication and cooperation between ministry staff and ministry staff and the applicant lump everything into that the ministry staff communicating and cooperating with local government staff is equally as important and to not only both parties but also to the applicants in a lot of cases it's super important if you're going to be submitting a lot of items on a regular basis to get to know your local office development approvals contacts go in and meet them walk into the office get to know them from face to face there's nothing wrong with that at all we encourage pre-submission or pre-discussions of applications as well if you think you're going to have a problem with something don't just submit it and then be surprised when it comes back as not to prove go in and talk to the dev tax or the provincial proving officer anyone in development approvals and a lot of time we work out some of those issues before they even come up and before the subdivision is even made and set up a system that works best for you and the staff you're commonly working with if you want to do everything by email tell the staff member hey just email me and they will think yeah that's great I'll just email them if you work in a municipality which wants everything in paper and wants an original signed copy of everything let the dev tech know that and that's perfectly fine we'll accommodate whatever works best for the applicant so that's mainly it's as far as the presentation goes so I don't know if our host here got any questions or comments but I've got my contact information here up on the screen I'll leave it there for a bit so you can jot that down if you want to and get a hold of me like I mentioned this presentation was not very specific in a lot of areas on purpose development approvals is a big thing developing land in the province of BC is a huge undertaking in a lot of cases so mentioned it a lot of times get in contact with your local offices there are the experts if you have any sort of other general questions or you want to know who to contact can't find that info drop me an email give me a phone call and I'll help you out as well and we'll wrap it there thank you so much Ryan it's really clear after you know seeing your presentation how complex a lot of these developments can be but it's also good to see how clearly client centric the ministry is and making sure that it's you know getting through and helping out the clients who want to make these developments as easy as possible so thank you again we did have a few questions come in first I do just want to apologize I know that we've run a little over our scheduled time for the webinar today but thanks to all those who have still stuck it out with us we've got two questions in the hopper right now so if you do have a burning question feel free to type it in now and I'll add it to the queue but off the top here Phil is asking if there is a building size requirement as well as the 800 meter requirement there is yes and it's it's a it's an either or it's not usually an end thing there is a building size requirement and that relates to development permits and commercial use for generally speaking commercial use for a site and it's a certain square footage I can look it up not sure if I'm still sharing my screen or not you are I believe it's I believe it's about 5200 square feet don't quote me on that right now run a lot of numbers through and the last couple days but it is directly available on the ministry's website the exact square footage amount where a local government is required to send us a referral for that process Tanya is suggesting or offering here 4500 square meters I don't know if that rings a bell with you Ryan but that's that's the number she's proposing yeah like I said don't quote me on the exact size it's somewhere in that neighborhood these exact numbers on on our website that sounds about right great so Tanya is also asking another question here she's saying for development permit approvals within municipalities where no zoning amendment is required nor access permit where does the ministry get authority to require transportation impact study is this through the municipality or does MOTI have jurisdiction anything that's sent to us and so the base sort of jurisdiction for review of those things comes via various legislation so the transportation act or the local government act whole bunch of various places if something comes to us we as a duty to protect our highway infrastructure and the ministry's investments we can basically require whatever we want there's not there isn't like a legislative list of things that we can and can't request if we feel that in order to make an informed and non-bias decision that a engineer's report is required for instance a traffic impact assessment or traffic impact study then that's what the development approvals technician is going to ask for it has a lot to do with like I just said they're making an informed decision with no bias the dev tech could just come back and say yeah no build us an intersection we don't care what the actual numbers are but in order to back up our decisions we like to have that stuff in writing so we're going to ask an engineer in that case to write us a report show us what's happening there give us some recommendations and with all things that are submitted to us it can be negotiated afterwards as well awesome thank you another question here from Bailey you had mentioned that development permits within the 800 meters must be approved by the ministry did you mean development permits issued through a local government or an MOTI specific permit so yeah development approvals issued by a local government they may to complicate that they may require a quote unquote permit from the ministry but they're two yeah separate things when we approve a development permit from a local government it's generally done just through some kind of letter or notification a lot of times just an email that email may contain requirements or not but there's no on a development permit there's no official signing off of it by the ministry great thanks and Carrie is asking can you talk a little more about when TIAs are required and what do you do if you think it is unacceptable so require a TIA it it comes down to a judgment call by the ministry staff and I say ministry staff because it's most likely not just the development approvals technician making that choice they've probably showed the application to their engineering staff or operations manager and we have numbers for our highways we know what the local traffic looks like and what the volume of each highway is and we're going to take a look at there's a book for trip generation hard and fast rules some offices are going to have say for instance if you're doing a development that adds 100 or more trips a day to the highway network then you are going to have to provide an impact assessment really what we're looking for is after that development goes in what is the impact going to be on the established highways intersections standard practice sort of standard procedure is that if the development will lead to a lower level of service on that intersection there's going to need to be some kind of improvement involved and we're looking for that TIA or TIS report to tell us what improvements could possibly be made the second part of the question is if you feel that it's unreasonable to provide that then honestly the easy way is just to tell the dev tech who responded say we've reviewed your request and it can come from the developer the agent the owner the municipal planning staff or engineering staff or the regional district staff you say you know what we would like you to reconsider this option don't just say just because that's probably not going to work but if you have a rationale or a very good reason to consider for asking us to withdraw that requirement then let us know and it will be reviewed and they'll take a look at it and decide whether or not yeah you know what they have a really good point let's withdraw that requirement or no sorry we have to stick to our guns and stick to our policies and procedures we're still going to require one and then again the results of that traffic impact assessment if they do come back to say no you know what you have to build a new left hand turn lane or you have to build a new intersection all those details can be further negotiated after the fact as well awesome thanks well I'm not seeing any more questions come in so maybe I'll just give a few more seconds here if if anyone's got any burning questions feel free to just hit the hands up button and then I know you're you're writing one in but just in the case that no others come in oh here we are Brittany asks is there somewhere we can view a published list of the controlled access highways that's a good question I'm not sure if there is I've never actually had to look for that information because I just deal with a specific area I would be surprised if there wasn't a published list the the rule of thumb to go by is if the highway has a number associated with it it's controlled access it's going to be the case for the vast majority of the highways out there I don't know if that information would be readily available for various sections of highways being controlled or not because that sort of designation is done through a very very formal legislative process best to contact your local area office in the ministry and ask that question if you're not sure because they'll know in that office what sections of highway are or are not controlled access and we've just got a follow-up from Kerry who is asking about the the traffic impact assessment she's saying I meant to say what if the ministry is not happy with the results of the TIA or do not agree with the results of the TIA yeah I guess that's fair enough the the negotiation process can go both ways if the if the ministry reviews the report and feels that it was possibly not created in good faith or there might be some underhanded engineering practices at play then that's a judgment call that they're gonna have to make they're gonna have to back up to their decision with rationale they're probably not just going to take a look at the document once and then plop it back on someone else's desk and say no no good take it back they should provide some kind of rationale for why they don't agree with it and why they feel there needs to be changed to it but yeah the the negotiation street goes both ways great thanks Ryan well given that we've gone over time oh Jeff right under the buzzer so Jeff asks recently received complaints from area residents in relation to the parking of unlicensed vehicles in an unconstructed portion of road dedication under the jurisdiction of MOTI any thoughts on how to deal with this situation now this is getting a little bit into the specifics now that's okay because it's really general it's actually very general it's a very very common problem that our operations department deals with on a daily basis one thing if it is under ministry control that means it's crowned land and therefore only the crown and or the RCMP has the authority to do anything there unless it's been given in writing by the ministry that someone else can somehow have authority in that area so best to do nothing until you've gone in contact with your local office the position that you're going to be looking for in that case is a road area manager so whichever road area manager for whatever part of the province that's happening in you're going to want to bring it to their attention because they're the correct person to start that process off and see if there can be some kind of resolution Jeff says thank you gentlemen you're most welcome Jeff and with that I think we will wrap up today's webinar Ryan thank you so much for coming by and sharing your incredible depth of expertise I'm sure there was a whole lot that wasn't presented in today's webinar and we probably could have delivered a workshop over the entire day but so thanks again and thank you to all the attendees if you came out today throughout the province really appreciate you taking the time out of what I'm sure very busy days for you as well to to learn and you know not only make your lives easier through these development approvals but I'm sure a lot of the development approval officers throughout the province will really appreciate some of the tips and tricks that you've picked up today so thanks again everyone and we will see you next time take care