Karen Ellis is looking forward to some golf and some recreational reading as she winds down from pouring over planning documents for the past 30 years.
After a planning career spanning more than 30 years, Director of Planning Karen Ellis is retiring this month.
She began as a consultant with a private firm with North Monaghan as one of her clients, joined North Monaghan staff in 2003 and then through the amalgamation became a member of the Cavan Monaghan planning department.
Karen has seen a lot of changes in the profession over the last 30 years. Looking back over her own career, she is pleased that efforts to protect farmland in the community have been largely successful. She credits our Councils for that achievement, who resisted the temptation to allow the fragmentation of prime agricultural land through severances, a trend which has met with more success in other locations.
As she describes it, planning is the act of looking to the future and establishing a framework that allows land use to evolve with changing market demands while protecting things that are crucial to the environment and to society. This means protecting things of value to the current and future community, including environmental assets such as wetlands, significant woodlands and habitats as well as cultural assets such as historical buildings and significant landmarks.
In the past, planning was not a common topic of discussion, but these days planning is in the news. Planners have been facing a barrage of new legislation which is revised with head-spinning frequency, putting a great deal of pressure on small planning departments to keep up. This proliferation of planning directives has been triggered by the housing crisis which federal and provincial governments are eager to address.
We might not appreciate the high density residential development with cookie-cutter homes in modern sub-divisions that are popping up in communities like ours, but they are a response to real market pressures, including rising infrastructure costs, a need for office space as people work from home, and a desire to build complete communities that are self-sufficient: with opportunities to work, live and play.
Her message to the community is that while planning departments sometimes have to say not to development requests, they are in fact hereto help. Their expertise often allows them to help residents find ways to achieve a project’s prime objectives by taking a different approach to their proposals. She would encourage residents to speak to planning department staff early in the process to save time, avoid frustration to determine what kind of development activity is possible to achieve the goal of a development proposal.
With her retirement, Cavan Monaghan loses a valuable resource whose extensive experience and thoughtful approach to her work gave her insight and perspective that has served us well.
Happy retirement, Karen, you’ve earned it!