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Many Municipality of the District of Lunenburg (MODL) residents will find themselves living in a new district following this October’s municipal election, as the polling district boundaries will change significantly.
This article includes interactive maps, using boundary district maps provided to The Barnacle by MODL, to show you the new district boundaries and to compare them to the existing boundaries. You can see all official information from MODL regarding the election on their website at https://www.modl.ca/elections.html.
See the changes
The following map shows the new boundaries for MODL’s polling districts that take effect in the October 2024 municipal election.
The following map shows an overlap of MODL’s new October 2024 districts with the districts that exist today. Land that remains in the same district appears in green. Land that has changed districts appears in red.
You can click or tap on any segment of the map to see what district it currently exists in, and what district it will exist in upon the new boundaries.
Why are the boundaries changing?
In 2022, MODL embarked upon a Boundary Review that determined the municipality should revise its polling boundaries, which define the districts within the municipality that are represented by a councillor.
When MODL performed their review, they determined that the Osprey Village planning area is going to see “imminent high-density growth”, and drafted new boundaries to redistribute the balance of residents across districts.
New boundaries for District 7 have carved out the communities of Sweetland and Farmland away from District 6 and created a new district centred around Cookville and the Osprey Village development area.
While every District other than the new District 7 will have between 2,000 to just over 2,300 residents, the new District 7 has only 1,323 residents. In MODL’s 2022 Master Plan for Osprey Village, they declare the development will have homes for more than 1,000 new residents in the next five years.
The Municipal Government Act required every Nova Scotia municipality to perform a boundary review in 2022 – this happens every eight years.
MODL’s boundary review determined “There is a need to establish a polling district for the Osprey Village area (the proposed District 7), where imminent high-density growth is anticipated.”
What public consultation occurred?
The municipality’s application to the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board details the process by which they had a committee draft new boundaries and sought public consultation.
The application says MODL provided notice to residents of the proposed boundaries “through the fall issue of the Municipal Matters newsletter sent to all households in the Municipality,” via Facebook, on their Engage.modl.ca website, and an advertisement in the Progress Bulletin newspaper (popularly known as LighthouseNow).
Only one resident submitted feedback to the notice, approving the boundaries. No one attended the public hearing.
