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Old Posted Feb 21, 2014, 6:10 AM
halifaxboyns halifaxboyns is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Waye Mason View Post
It was publicly announced in December, it has been four months! An a couple months it goes to a joint HWCC/HRM Council session and public hearing for consideration of the MPS change. This is not tortured, is is expedited - you cannot get an MPS/Comprehensive Plan change in any jurisdiction in weeks and months, these things always require public input. When I spoke about this with the Toronto Developer building Southport he said a fast approval in Toronto is 18-24 months.
Interesting - here in Calgary we require you undertake your land use amendment (rezoning - which can include a policy amendment) and then your Development Permit. The Development Permit (particularly multi-residential development) tends to be what we call a discretionary use meaning the public has an opportunity to comment and a right of appeal, but the rezoning and policy amendment cannot be appealed (although public consultation and a public hearing is required).

Under the new planning system we are moving towards (aka Transforming Planning) the idea has been to setup a lot of the tough conversations ahead of time and that these conversations include both the land use (rezoning) discussions and then the discussions on the building. What this will move too is allowing a developer submit a joint application for rezoning and development permit at the same time BUT the permit would not be approved until the rezoning is done. So we could progress it to a certain point but then would have to wait for the rezoning public hearing to occur and be passed by Council (all three readings and the bylaw signed). Once that occurs, then we would be good to go with an approval or scheduling the item to Calgary Planning Commission.

We are still in early days of progressing with the new system (first steps start in week 1 of March); but I've always believed this was the way forward. It didn't waste people's time with multiple meetings and discussions on certain types of applications and then the comments didn't make sense (ie: bringing up issues that were more Development Permit related, versus whether the rezoning was appropriate or not - this happens all the time).

But we are averaging somewhere between 6 to 12 months for typical to complex rezoning applications (depending on how complex it becomes). When I did the development permit for the "Lido" in Kensington, I think from the time it came in the door (March) it ended up at Planning Commission in November (and a month of that is mainly deadlines for drafting and finalizing the report, so it was about 8 months. As I recall; we had some last minute issues come up that caused a delay plus everything went off the rails once the flood happened.
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