News clips: Ontario launches yet another municipal planning review
By: Christopher Hume Toronto Star Oct 24 2013
Let the word go forth: the province is “reviewing the way municipalities plan and pay for development to ensure growth is smart and sustainable.”
The announcement was delivered — drum roll, please — at historic Fort York by the minister of municipal affairs and housing, Linda Jeffrey. From Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, Ottawa to Toronto, workshops will be held, feedback received and emails sent.
At this point, it may not be easy finding anyone left in Ontario who has a planning gripe that remains unheard, still we wish the minister well.
If nothing else, she will surely discover it will take more than a few public workshops to regain control of planning in this province.
The truth is that we long ago handed the future of Ontario’s towns and cities to private interests. Municipalities keep planning departments to fill in the forms, tick off the boxes and generally maintain the illusion they are in control, but as they all know, the development industry calls the shots. And it only cares about one thing — profit.
That’s why the landscape of Ontario — or at least, southern Ontario — has become as degraded, denuded, depressing and demoralized as it is.
Though the provincial government can point to the Greenbelt and Places to Grow legislation as steps in the right direction, the fact remains that developers continue to lay waste to the landscape every chance they get. Their great legacy is continuous sprawl from Oshawa to Mississauga and beyond, an endless swath of unsustainable and bleakly homogeneous housing that will bankrupt its inhabitants many times over in the decades ahead.
Frederick Gardiner, the first chair of the now disappeared Metropolitan Toronto government and the man for whom the elevated expressway was named, called in “multiplication by subdivision,” but not even he could have foreseen what has transpired.
Virtually every town and city, as well as the province, has declared war on sprawl. Even Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, who presides over the suburbanization of Canada’s sixth-largest “city,” has changed her ways and now extols the virtues of density and public transit.
But still it spreads as far as the eye can see.
Developers have seen to it that the talk remains just that — talk. Their power far outweighs that of any local councillor. Besides, many councillors depend on handouts from developers to get elected in the first place. Not many are willing to bite the hand that feeds them at voting time,
One of the topics Jeffrey hopes to explore is development fees, the one issue that strikes fear and loathing into the hearts of builders. As the minister will surely find out, it’s time to get serious about these charges, which can be used to tame untrammeled growth and force those who make money from it to bear its costs.
Typically, the public sector pays those bills; leaving developers free to skim vast profits off the top.
The Ontario Municipal Board, which has final say on what gets built and which isn’t under review, is the industry’s natural ally. Its quasi-judicial process favours those who can afford more lawyers, planners, architects and other friendly experts to testify on their behalf. Even the City of Toronto, with its credentialized army has difficulty keeping up with the demands of the OMB system.
What Jeffrey will hear — if she hasn’t already — is that planning must be strengthened and empowered to the point where it serves the public, not private, good. That will terrify developers and their political lapdogs. It will mean behaving like adults, not children spoilt by getting their own way a few too many times.
OMB operations excluded from Ontario planning review
Provincial workshops to focus on development issues
By: Susan Pigg Toronto Star Oct 24 2013
An 80-day public consultation process around urban growth, announced by the province Thursday, will do more to protect developers than ensure the sound planning of Toronto’s evolving neighbourhoods, says downtown councillor Adam Vaughan.
Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Linda Jeffrey has given builders, ratepayers and other interested stakeholders until Jan. 10 to weigh in on a host of issues around land-use planning and development charges in writing or at six public workshops.
Two discussion papers, both released online Thursday, are meant to set the parameters for yet another attempt by the Liberals to deal with persistent complaints about the planning process and, more specifically, the OMB, largely in the wake of intensification spurred by the province’s Places to Grow and greenbelt policies.
Except that Jeffrey made it clear at a news conference, held at Fort York in the shadow of towering condos under construction, that “eliminating or changing the OMB’s operations” is not up for discussion, just improving the appeal process.
She also stressed that new development levies or taxes on new condos or homes will not be part of the discussion.
“As long as the OMB is in charge, it undermines our ability to deliver better planning and stronger neighbourhoods,” said Vaughan, whose downtown Trinity-Spadina ward has undergone some of the most intense redevelopment in the city over the last decade.
“This (public consultation) isn’t planning reform. It’s a move, effectively, to give developers more power and cities less power and once again leave neighbourhoods vulnerable.”
Just six workshops are planned across Ontario, and just two of them in the GTA: One is slated for Mississauga on Nov. 28, the other for Toronto on Dec. 9.
Comment is being sought, face-to-face at the workshops or in writing via the website, on a host of land use planning and financing issues.
Some $1.3 billion in development charges were collected by 200 Ontario municipalities in 2011, 70 per cent in the GTA. Builders have complained those fees have adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of new housing and burdened buyers with a disproportionate share of infrastructure costs across the GTA.
There needs to be more transparency around how that money is spent, said Jeffrey.
“We hope the focus (of the consultations) will be on affordability and fairness,” said Joe Vaccaro, chief executive of the Ontario Home Builders’ Association.
Suburban mayors, in particular, have been calling for even higher development charges, to cover hospitals and transit, so builders were relieved that “creating additional fees and/or taxes” is excluded from the discussion.
The “focused” 80-day process is about “having a conversation, having a vision” for helping municipalities grow over the coming decades, said Jeffrey.
But one huge challenge that’s going to be tough to hammer out in just 80 days is “the country-club mentality” of municipalities and existing residents toward new condo and home developments, said veteran urban planner and development consultant Barry Lyon.
The attitude in established communities is: “We’re here, we’re happy and if you want to join our club you have to pay through the nose to come in here,” said Lyon. “The initiation fees are steep and getting steeper all the time because of all these add-on fees.”
Facilitators at the workshops will need to also be “interpreters,” Lyon added.
“None of the people that they are addressing — planner, developers, residents — speak the same language. They’ve got a major educating role here because no one understands the others’ position and it’s going to take the patience of Job to pull these sides together.”
ROUND-TABLE MEETING
Ontario Municipal Affairs Minister sits down with Londoners
By Chip Martin, The London Free Press October 24, 2013
Ontario Municipal Affairs Minister Linda Jeffrey says she wants to hear how Ontario can make municipal planning smarter and more sustainable.
And that means a look at development charges, the fees that municipalities charge for growth, and finding ways to improve local flexibility and reduce appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board.
“I came here to listen to good ideas,” Jeffrey, in London on Thursday, told Mayor Joe Fontana, community activists, academics, homebuilders and developer before a round-table session with them.
“It’s time for a refresh” of municipal planning, Jeffrey said at a news conference.
Earlier in Toronto, the minister, a former Brampton city politician, announced the review in response to development pressure in booming areas. She said she wants to encourage greater local collaboration and decision making.
Accountability and transparency will be key to the review, which will include regional workshops — to consider changes to land-use planning and development charges — to be held in Toronto, Peel Region, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Ottawa and Kitchener-Waterloo.
Asked why London and Windsor, with their comparatively slower growth, aren’t included for workshops, Jeffrey said it’s not possible to hold them everywhere, noting Ontario has 444 municipalities.
The review should lead to an improved, faster process that responds to changing municipal needs.
Coun. Joni Baechler, among the Londoners Jeffrey met with, said it’s clear the minister is seeking “a quick consultation” and input only until Jan. 10.
“Cities are cash-strapped financially,” Baechler said, noting London has a backlog of $700 million in capital projects.
“We need help in the long run, so changes to planning processes and development charges need to be considered,” she said.
A ministry backgrounder said there are no plans to eliminate or change OMB operations, practices or procedures. The province will still be able to intervene in planning matters.
Municipal flexibility to deal with local priorities will be kept and the principle of “growth pays for growth” will remain.
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