City councillor Kirk Cameron has floated the concept of Whitehorse residents having a direct say in the maximum height limit for local buildings.

It involves voters expressing their will in a plebiscite at the same time they elect a new mayor and council this October.

On May 8, council voted to send the issue of maximum building heights back to city administration for further study. They had been working with a proposed new limit of 40 metres (133 feet).

The Official Community Plan (OCP) sets a limit of 30 metres, and any new limit would require an amendment to the plan.

Building heights arose again during Tuesday evening’s standing committees meeting.

Nathan Millar of the Downtown Residents Association, as he had on May 8, appeared before council members with a succinct query.

“I am here to ask you a simple question: what problem are you trying to solve?” Millar said.

“If we are looking at 12-storey buildings for solutions to what ails this city, we are not going to solve anything. You have lost us a little bit.

“There are lots of reasons why we think 12-storey buildings are a bad idea.”

Millar asked council members to “clearly articulate what you think the problem is. Is it homelessness? Housing affordability? Population growth?”

The territorial Bureau of Statistics has forecast that the city’s population may be an estimated 46,000 people by 2040. Meanwhile, the city’s revised OCP works with an anticipated population of 47,000.

Therefore, Millar said, the city has already essentially prepared for that size of population growth without the need for structures as high as 12 stories.

Responding to Millar’s comments, Cameron said the problems the city is attempting to resolve include all the challenges Millar mentioned in his query to council members.

“This debate may not conclude by the end of the mandate of this council,” Cameron noted.

“That concerns me.”

He then asked Millar what he thought of arranging for a plebiscite on the issue, attached to voters’ municipal election ballots. That would help “inform” the next council and enable those men and women to continue the debate, Cameron said.

Millar replied that the public is not concerned about the time left in council’s mandate, and nothing else was said about a potential plebiscite.

“If you are trying to solve all the problems, you are not going to solve any of them,” Millar said.

What’s needed is “broader public engagement” on the issue with a clear question on how residents want the city to proceed, he added.