What's new on DenmanIsland.co. We ship in the open.
2026-10-13
Ferry countdowns and estimated vessel positions now use the same local clock. They keep the correct time through November and winter under B.C.'s year-round Pacific time, including on devices with older timezone data.
2026-10-13
Maps, research pages and other tools now load when you open them. The island sites and Abolish the Islands Trust need a smaller initial download before you can start reading.
2026-09-17
The paper has moved to /firestarter, and every island site in the network now carries its own edition at the same address: hornbytown.org/firestarter, maynetown.org/firestarter and the rest. A decision that binds the whole trust area, such as a Trust Council or Executive Committee vote, is reported once and appears on every island edition; a local trust committee decision appears on that island's edition only. Syndicated reports are one article shared, not thirteen copies, so a correction to one corrects them all. The reporting job runs every six hours across the islands in turn, rather than once a day for Denman alone.
2026-09-17
Our standards page has always said reports are checked before they publish: sourced, resolvable, contained in the document we cite, every number traceable, and no evaluative language. All five ask whether a sentence is supported. None asked whether the body we just criticised got to answer. From today a report saying a named public body failed, breached or misled does not publish unless it also carries that body's own account, or says plainly that we asked them and what came back, and an allegation resting on a single source does not publish either. The article waits with the reason attached until the other side is in it. This cuts against us: the same publisher runs a campaign against the Islands Trust.
2026-09-16
The Islands Trust's 2020 aerial survey covers Denman too, and it is the sharpest picture of the island we can show: about 15 centimetres to a pixel. The satellite slider on the Denman map now includes it between the 2014 Trust photos and the recent Esri captures, with the Trust credited on the picture.
2026-09-15
The satellite slider on the Denman map now spans 1999 to 2026. The Islands Trust's own aerial photographs of Denman — flown in 1999, 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2014 — join the Esri historical captures, so a lot, a shoreline or a woodlot can be watched changing across twenty-eight years. Every other island gets its own survey years where the Trust flew them, with the Trust credited on the picture.
2026-09-11
Our old position feed could not hear Baynes Sound at all, which is why the map never showed our own two ferries. It now also reads the AISHub network, which does hear them: positions arrive every one to six minutes, and the map shows each ferry's position with how old it is and credits AISHub. A per-second feed still wins whenever one is available, and when no position has arrived the map falls back to the marked schedule estimate.
2026-09-11
The Ferries page was showing a handful of wrong Denman departures, because the BC Ferries pages we read had stopped carrying a timetable and a service notice for another route was read as sailings. It now uses the same BC Ferries current-conditions feed as the home page, with every sailing. The map no longer says it is live just because it is connected: it says live only when a ferry's position is minutes old, shows when a position was last seen, and when there is no live position it shows where today's sailings put each ferry, marked as an estimate. Ships now carry the name they broadcast, which fixes two mislabelled Gulf Islands ferries.
2026-09-11
The Denman map has an Empty lots view. A lot counts as empty only when two independent sources agree: no building in the mapped building footprints and no building value on the 2026 BC Assessment roll. Each empty lot is coloured by whether proposed Bylaw 264 would let it have fewer, the same or more homes than today's zoning, and the legend totals the homes they allow now and as proposed, as principal homes or all dwelling units. Lots with only one source are shown as unknown rather than assumed empty. The map also now opens with the water zones and aquifer layers switched off; tick them to show them.
2026-09-11
The Denman map has a new Land-Share view beside the homes views. Land-Share Housing is the renamed co-housing zone in proposed Bylaw 264: up to 19 homes of up to 186 square metres, plus a common house, on a lot of 35 hectares or more, once the lot is rezoned into it. The view colours every existing lot by that size test and by the farmland reserve, which adds the Agricultural Land Commission's approval, and counts them. Parks and conservation land are shown separately. Selecting a lot explains its result with the bylaw page.
2026-09-11
Three fixes to lot pages. Houses on Agriculture, Forestry and Resource lots must sit 4.5 metres from side and rear lot lines, not the 3 metres we showed, and we now cite the right table in Bylaw 186 (Table 5). Commercial and institutional lots now show their 7.5 metre front setback. A lot that is entirely farmland reserve except for a mapping sliver is now labelled as fully in the reserve. And a lot page's estimated value now updates with every weekly revaluation, so it matches the map instead of showing an older figure.
2026-09-11
The Denman dwelling map now resolves most lots it left gray. It measures how much of each lot lies in the Agricultural Land Reserve (10% or less is treated as outside, 90% or more as inside), applies the Province's one-principal-residence rule on reserve land, reads all 30 site-specific zoning clauses in both bylaws, and treats Resource lots as the Rural Residential zone Bylaw 264 proposes for them. Where the bylaw leaves an extra unit unclear, the all-units view shows 'at least N'. About 15 of 941 lots still need individual review in the principal-home view.
2026-09-10
The Denman parcel map now switches between existing rules, proposed Bylaw 264 and the difference. Choose principal homes or all dwelling units; selected lots show both scenarios with source clauses. Temporary-use permits are separate, and unresolved combinations, site-specific rules and partial ALR coverage are marked for review. These are modeled counts on existing lots, not subdivision yields or building approvals.
2026-09-10
Pepper Lane was a real proposal for eight seniors’ homes at 3730 Denman Road. The housing association reports that the original land was lost. The current operator lists five seniors’ homes within Denman Green’s proposed twenty, with construction funding being sought. We have corrected the pages and artwork so the old eight are not counted as a separate active project. The transparency page now uses the site’s working layout and records these material corrections.
2026-09-10
A six-perspective review challenged the pages, calculations, articles and downloadable graphics. We corrected claims about housing duties, ALR permissions, governance-review progress and incorporation; separated housing need from zoning capacity; and labelled parcel counts as screening estimates rather than approvals. Farm comparisons now use the same matched records on the data and farm pages. Article corrections retain earlier versions. Share images, signs and PDFs carry the corrected wording. Earlier release notes describe the versions then published; this correction supersedes their affected claims.
2026-09-06
The public listing board and the My Island aliases are no longer hidden from search. Create a listing at My Island after you confirm your email and say you live on Denman.
2026-09-06
Our standards page said we had searched the Islands Trust minutes and found no record that the Executive Committee approved Denman's amended public-notification bylaw. That was wrong. The Executive Committee approved it on 3 June 2026, and the record was in the documents we already held — our search was faulty and we reported its result as a finding. The page is corrected.
2026-09-06
In March the Denman Local Trust Committee changed its public-notification rule to require notices in a newspaper that publishes at least once a month on Denman Island. A weekly Denman paper qualifies, which means the body we report on could become a paying customer while the same publisher campaigns to abolish it. Our standards page now says so, commits to publishing any amount we ever take from a public body, and records that we have taken none.
2026-09-06
Denman has a newspaper again. Reports carry facts and citations only; opinion lives in a separate, labelled Analysis section. Every article is checked before it publishes: each source must load, and where we hold the document ourselves — minutes, agendas, bylaws, meeting transcripts — the passage we quote must actually appear in it. Corrections are published and dated, and the archive of automatically compiled items from 2018 to 2026 now lives separately, labelled for what it is.
2026-09-06
Some news items were compiled from community Facebook posts, where we write our own summary of a post rather than repeat a private person's words. Those summaries were shown inside quotation marks, which wrongly made them look like something a person actually said. They are now plainly labelled as our summary. We also corrected the publication dates the site gives to search engines, made the news list order the same for readers and search engines, and stopped unpublished items being readable through the site's data feed.
2026-09-05
Fixed an error that could stop the confirmation button in a petition email from counting your signature. Your private link stays private.
2026-09-05
Sign in with a code, even when tracking scripts are blocked. Autofill and private-link recovery work without waiting for the page to notice your email. Spam checks run behind the scenes, with a clear retry message when needed.
2026-09-05
Confirm your email, say you live on Denman, and use My Island to post a service, a place to stay, an item, a ride, an event or a community notice. Posts are reviewed before they appear. You can edit, pause or remove your own posts.
2026-08-26
The Strathcona Regional District moved from strathconard.ca to srd.ca. Every zoning value we hold for Cortes and Quadra — 2,503 lots — cited the old address, which no longer resolves. All of them now cite the district's live land-use page. The zoning data itself is unchanged and still comes from the same Strathcona bylaws; only the address moved.
2026-08-26
A full check of every outbound source across the network found six links that had gone dead because the site on the other end reorganised, and all six are now repaired and re-verified. The Province moved its Islands Trust overview, which is the source for the 5,200 km² land-and-water scale on the water study; the Islands Trust renamed its annual-report and financial-reports pages, which carry the Conservancy figures; the Trust also moved the Hornby Island Official Community Plan; the Land Title and Survey Authority moved its title-search page, which is linked from every lot page; Lasqueti's community site moved its ferry page; and the Strathcona Regional District moved to a new domain. In every case the underlying facts were re-checked against the relocated source and none of them changed — only the addresses did.
2026-08-26
Islands Trust on Denman, Bylaw disputes, How we estimate property values and the Privacy Policy were all reachable by clicking through the site, and the first two are in the main navigation — but opening, refreshing or sharing their addresses directly returned "Page Not Found", and the sitemap was telling search engines to crawl them anyway. All four now server-render their own title, description and summary like every other public page. A test checks the sitemap against the server on every run, so a page cannot be advertised and missing at the same time again.
2026-08-25
The artists directory, individual profile pages, navigation and sitemap links, submissions, discovery jobs, and administrative controls have been removed from DenmanIsland.co. Former directory URLs and APIs now return 404. Historical database rows remain offline as an inert archive and are not exposed to visitors, search engines, the site assistant, or administrators.
2026-08-24
We corrected host canonicals and sitemaps, strengthened no-JavaScript campaign pages, fixed pre-existing map, media-gallery, crawler and route type errors, and regenerated the current social and poster artwork from deterministic source files.
2026-08-23
Every petition homepage, substantial argument section, and public post now has a top-right share control. It opens a 1080-by-1350 image made from that exact page heading, excerpt, and deep link. On a phone or supported desktop browser, native share sends the PNG and link to installed apps. The same panel covers Facebook, WhatsApp, Bluesky, Threads, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram, Pinterest, email, and SMS, with copy-image, copy-caption, PNG download, and print for everywhere else. The four property families keep distinct art direction. Their illustrated backgrounds make no factual claim: every word and source destination is drawn from the live page in deterministic code.
2026-08-23
The island-town petition now says exactly what it asks and what it does not: a town with a council residents elect and can replace; current law requires an island municipality while the Trust area exists; abolition is a separate decision. Earlier signatures have not been rewritten or silently moved. They remain attached to version 1 unless their owner reads and explicitly accepts version 2 from the private management page. Public totals now separate current-version signatures from earlier-version supporters, current PDFs include version 2 only, and the full wording history is public. A one-time correction notice shows both texts, contains no cross-petition pitch, and says plainly that doing nothing preserves version 1. The abolition petition demand itself is unchanged. We also retired an 86% water creative after finding that it mixed different land and area geographies; parcel-residual estimates are now labelled with their road and unsurveyed-land caveat. Marine zoning is valid, reference maps and GIS exist, and the narrower demand is to publish the controlling records online. Campaign ad routes are paused while election-period registration and authorization requirements are resolved.
2026-08-23
On the morning of 23 August, every attempt to sign the petition failed. The form returned an error and, worse, printed the database's own error text at whoever was trying to sign. It lasted several hours and we found it because the signature count stopped moving, not because anything alerted us. The cause was ours: a change adding comment screening passed an empty list into a database query in a way that produced invalid SQL, and because almost every signature has no comment attached, it failed for everybody rather than for a rare case. It is fixed, and confirmed working on phones and desktop. Two things follow that matter more than the bug. If you tried to sign during that window, your signature was never recorded — nothing was stored, so we cannot even email you to apologise. Please sign again; it takes a minute. And every release from now on is gated on a check that fills in the real form on the live site and confirms a signature can actually be created, at three screen sizes. Nothing we had — the type checker, the build, 234 tests, the accessibility and mobile audits — could catch this, because a page looks identical whether or not the thing behind it works.
2026-08-22
Most people read this network on a phone, so it has been measured on one. Every button, link and form field is now at least 44 pixels tall — the size a thumb actually hits — and no text field renders under 16 pixels, which is the point where iPhones zoom the page in and do not zoom back out. The campaign material page no longer scrolls sideways: the ad previews were rendering at their true widths, up to 970 pixels, and pushed a 320-pixel screen more than 400 pixels off to the right. They now scale to fit at full fidelity. Three of these faults were invisible on a desktop browser and none of them broke the build, so there is now a script that loads each page at phone widths and measures what rendered, and tests that fail if the old traps come back. Separately, after you sign the petition you are offered — once, not pushed — the option to tell people you know. It sends from your own email, everyone goes in BCC, and the addresses never reach our servers: nothing to keep, because we never receive them.
2026-08-21
Until today this network held no population data at all. Each island site now states how many people Statistics Canada counted there in 2021, how that changed since 2016, and how many of its dwellings are nobody's home — each figure with its census year and a link to the StatCan table it came from. Two things worth knowing about the numbers: they cover the Trust Area designated place rather than the island's shoreline, and Statistics Canada publishes no age breakdown at that geography, so anything we say about the adult population is an estimate and is labelled as one.
2026-08-21
Sign a petition and you can pick a weekly digest, daily, every two weeks, monthly, or no email at all — and change it any time from the private link we send you. The digest covers what changed on the sites, what turned up in the public record, and how the petitions moved, with every figure sourced. If you signed before this existed we will write once to ask what you want; if you ignore that email, you stay off the list. Unsubscribing is one click and never removes your name from the petition.
2026-08-21
Until today only DenmanIsland.co published a running list of what changed. Every site in the network now has its own Release Notes page, linked from the footer, showing the changes that affected that site. It is the same standing rule we already followed — anything a visitor can notice gets written down — just published where the visitors are.
2026-08-21
Our parcel totals were counting statutory rights-of-way — leases, licences of occupation and similar interests that are registered over land rather than being parcels of it — as if they were lots. Because they overlap the lots beneath them, they inflated every hectare total, badly in places: Galiano was showing 23,229 hectares for an island of roughly 5,700. They are now excluded from every total. We have also relabelled the figure as mapped parcel area rather than land area, because the parcel fabric covers the whole Local Trust Area including foreshore and marine parcels. Individual lot pages are unchanged — a right-of-way is a real registered interest and still shows on the lot it crosses.
2026-08-21
Gambier and North Pender were showing each lot's zoning with no citation behind it, and 819 of Cortes's 820 lots were citing the wrong island's bylaw — the regional district publishes Cortes and Quadra zoning from one layer whose shapes reach across the channel between them. All three are corrected, so every zoned lot on the network now names the bylaw it came from.
2026-08-21
Lasqueti and Texada have drilled wells on record but no provincially mapped aquifer at all. The water page used to say no record was "available yet", which read as something we had not got round to fetching. It now names the gap for what it is, shows the well count and the median depth, bedrock and yield the Province does record, and notes that none of the usual provincial ratings — vulnerability, productivity, demand, water quality — exist for these islands.
2026-08-20
Each island-town site has a public signatures page listing the people who chose to show their name, with the date they signed and any comment they left. Signatures marked private are counted but never named, and email addresses are never published. Islands with no signatures yet publish that honestly too, with an invitation to be the first.
2026-08-20
Every island site now has a full water report at /water: each aquifer the Province maps beneath the island, its vulnerability, productivity and demand ratings, wells on record, water licences, and the provincial observation wells tracking long-term levels — plus median well depth and yield from wells actually drilled on that island's lots. Gabriola and Salt Spring lead with written analysis; every other island gets the same data.
2026-08-20
Every petition form now has "Already signed? Email me my sign-in link". Enter the address you signed with and the private link comes straight back to your inbox — no account, no password. From that link you can switch your name between public and private, edit your comment, or withdraw entirely.
2026-08-20
Lot pages now show wells registered on that lot in the Province's GWELLS registry — depth, bedrock depth, reported yield, and a link to the provincial record — plus aggregate context for wells within 500 m (count and medians only; individual neighbouring wells are never listed, and owner information is never stored or shown).
2026-08-20
New /water page tells the island's groundwater story straight from provincial data: one bedrock aquifer (Aquifer 740) under nearly the whole island, its High vulnerability classification explained, plus well counts, water licences, and the active provincial observation well from the GWELLS registry. Every lot record now shows which mapped aquifer sits beneath it, and the map's aquifer popups include wells-on-record and licence counts.
2026-08-20
The parcel maps now carry the Province of B.C.'s official groundwater aquifer mapping as a toggleable layer — on denmanisland.co and every island-town site. Tap an aquifer for the provincial classification (material, vulnerability, productivity, demand), its mapped size, and a link to the provincial factsheet. Provincial mapping shows a single bedrock aquifer (Aquifer 740, 47.7 km², mapped 2006) underlying nearly all of Denman Island, alongside the confined sand-and-gravel Aquifer 739 on the east side. Every lot record also now notes which mapped aquifer most underlies it. Source: B.C. Ground Water Aquifers dataset, Open Government Licence — BC.
2026-08-20
Confirming a petition signature now lands on a share page: your name in a signature card, ready-made posts for X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit and email, a downloadable share image, and QR codes for flyers. Signed the abolish petition? One click also adds you to your island's own become-a-town petition (and the other way around) — no second confirmation email, because your address was already verified.
2026-08-19
Signing the Trust-wide abolition petition or any separate island petition now works in two steps: add your name, then click the confirmation link we email you. Your signature counts the moment you confirm. Every signature made before this change stays counted; nothing was removed. Why the change: it stops anyone else from signing or altering a signature using your email address, and it makes every published count one a skeptic can trust. Each island site now also sends its mail from its own domain.
2026-08-19
abolishislandstrust.org now has a central signature ledger. It totals the Trust-wide abolition petition and every separate island petition, and lets you look up names people chose to publish. Private signatures stay in the counts only.
2026-08-19
Tony Aly's involvement with Camp Denman (also known as Elkhaven / Elk Haven) is stated on the ownership and transparency pages, the directory, and the Elkhaven archive. The live portfolio — landintelligence.co, denmanisland.co, denmantown.org, abolishislandstrust.org, the island-town sites, and iloveislandstrust.org — is described as a private network, not a federation of local chapters.
2026-06-09
We renamed our independent market-value estimate from "DenmanValue" to "LandIntelVal." The methodology is unchanged — it's the same comparable-sales, waterfront-aware land model plus measured-footprint building value, still clearly an estimate and not an appraisal. The new name reflects that this estimate now extends beyond Denman to Hornby Island and the Comox Valley Regional District's Electoral Area A, and will keep expanding. (Earlier changelog entries still say "DenmanValue" — that was its name at the time, and we don't rewrite history.)
2026-06-07
The island map can now colour parcels by value, not just by zone. Toggle between assessed value, estimated tax revenue, our DenmanValue market estimate, and the property tax that would be collected if our market estimates were taxed at each lot's current rate. Colours run a light-to-deep scale by quantile, and the legend shows the island median and average for whatever you're viewing. The legend itself is now collapsible — and starts minimized on phones so it doesn't cover the map.
2026-06-01
A new Farms section presents an aggregate analysis of farm-class assessment on Denman: across the ~53 parcels whose public records show an assessment pattern consistent with Class 9 (Farm), total assessed value vs. our market estimate, and an estimated $645,000/yr difference from a residential-class counterfactual. This is not tax owed or revenue lost. Farm class is a legal program with a public purpose; this is aggregate, clearly labelled analysis from public data, not a statement about any individual property.
2026-06-01
We added current building footprints from Overture Maps (refreshed roughly monthly, vs. the older 2018–21 imagery), kept alongside the previous set as a fallback, and the code now prefers the fresher data. Lot maps render the actual building outlines over satellite imagery.
2026-06-01
After a reader pointed out that an 18.8-hectare oceanfront lot was valued far too low, we rebuilt DenmanValue from the ground up. It no longer leans on BC Assessment's figures (which are low, especially for farm-class land); instead it values land from a waterfront-aware base plus a market rate for additional acreage, and buildings at a Denman replacement cost of ~$350/sq ft of measured footprint. Waterfront now lifts only the homesite, not every back acre. The result is far more realistic — and the gap between assessed and market value is now visible per lot.
2026-06-01
Lot maps now display the actual building footprints over satellite imagery, with a count and total floor-area measurement — so you can see what's really on a property, not just its outline.
2026-06-01
Lots that appear to hold farm-class assessment now prominently show an estimated public-data farm-income threshold under BC's rules. For parcels over 10 acres, the legal formula uses 5% of the farm operation's actual value for farm purposes beyond the 10-acre baseline; because BC Assessment's farm-purpose value and actual income are not public, our displayed number is a proxy estimate.
2026-05-31
Lot pages now show how far the nearest substantial building sits from the closest property line, measured from satellite building footprints, alongside the minimum lot-line setback Land Use Bylaw 186 sets for that zone. Where a building appears to sit inside the minimum it's noted — clearly framed as a measurement, not a determination of non-compliance (a building may pre-date the bylaw, be an accessory structure, or follow a boundary with different rules). Front-yard and sea setbacks, which are larger, come next.
2026-05-31
Our earlier tax estimate was materially too low: it left out the CVRD and local service-area levies that make up a big share of a Denman bill — Denman Fire, Community Parks, Garbage, Vancouver Island Regional Library, Community Facilities, CVRD Denman/Hornby, Recreation, regional solid waste, 911, Economic Development, Grant, and Heritage. The real residential rate is about $4.64 per $1,000, not $2.94. Every lot's estimate has been recomputed. (Estimates still assume Residential class and are per legal lot — a home spanning several lots pays the sum.)
2026-05-31
Each lot now shows DenmanValue — our independent estimate of market value, built from BC Assessment's land value plus the building value implied by the actual building footprint we measure from satellite imagery (or the reported value, whichever is greater). Because BC Assessment often under-reports building size and count, this is frequently higher than the official assessment. Lots also show their measured building count and footprint area, and likely farm-class assessment is flagged with the minimum farm income required to qualify.
2026-05-31
We published a public page for every parcel on the island — zoning (Land Use Bylaw 186), Agricultural Land Reserve status, area, ownership type, and an estimated property tax, each with a link to the public source it came from.
2026-05-31
A new interactive map of every parcel, coloured by zoning, with click-through to each lot's full record.
2026-05-31
Each lot now shows an estimated annual property tax based on the actual 2025 rural rates for our jurisdiction (CVRD Area A), applied to the assessed value — clearly labelled as an estimate.
2026-05-31
A data portrait of the island: lots by zone, residences, ALR share, total assessed value, median value by neighbourhood, and estimated property tax by zone.
2026-05-31
Thousands of real happenings compiled from community sources (starting with The Islands Grapevine), sorted by date, each linked to its source. An ongoing, growing record.
2026-05-31
The Real Estate page now shows current homes for sale and for rent on a map and list, with the option to view historical listings and their timelines.
2026-05-31
Rezoning, development, and variance applications from the Islands Trust now appear on the specific lots they concern, linked to the official record.
Related private projects: abolishislandstrust.org · denmantown.org