City staff have drafted a cautious response to the Prince George Air Improvement Roundtable's proposed phase three plan.
PGAIR's report calls on the city to make 12 changes to its operations to improve air quality in the city. City environment manager Dan Adamson said the report was sent to the city's departments for comment.
"Each department will have their own idea of what might work," Adamson said. "Some of these thing we're already doing, some are budget priority items and others we hadn't considered before."
The city's response was slated to go before city council for approval on May 9, but it was postponed to allow council time to deal with a last-minute change to the tax structure.
Among PGAIR's recommendations were providing tax incentives to businesses to pave their parking lots and upgrade equipment to reduce emissions, paving gravel roads, increasing education and enforcement of the city's Clean Air Bylaw, enhancing street sweeping, improving public transit and alternative transportation opportunities, reducing gravel pit operations, optimizing traffic signals to reduce idling, setting emission standards for city contractors, putting "strong language" in the official community plan to encourage continuous air quality improvement, and limiting future restaurant drive-thrus.
On the issue of drive-thrus, Adamson said any changes to city regulations on drive-thrus would not apply to existing operations.
"City staff will examine options and have discussions with community partners around addressing air quality issues associated with drive-thrus, including zoning... education and awareness, to reduce the reliance on drive-thrus," the city's draft response says.
If city council supports that direction, Adamson said, then city staff will look at measures taken by other cities -including North Vancouver - to restrict drive-thrus through zoning.
"At this level, it doesn't deal with the budget issues," Adamson added. "If individual departments wanted to move forward on some of this, they'd have to come back to council on that."
The full report still has to go before city council for final approval before it is referred back to PGAIR. At this point, a date has not been set for the report to be presented to council.
Full copies of the report are available online at princegeorge.ca.
