City planning staff is recommending that Council
not support the zoning changes that would allow for this building. Since the developer appealed this to the OLT, Council does not have the ability to grant zoning changes for this property at this time, but they can express support (or not).
This will be discussed at Council's planning committee on May 22nd, then at full Council on June 4th.
https://london.ca/sites/default/file...20%28CM%29.pdf
The main rationale for staff's recommendation is that this proposal does not fit within several of their plans and policies. The report above goes into very long specifics (I didn't read it all lol) but I think it can be summarized into the following:
- This area already has an official area policy, and these take precedence over any other plan... the policy states that "Lands within the St. George/Grosvenor Neighbourhood will remain a predominantly low density, low-rise residential area despite continual redevelopment pressure for apartment buildings, expansions to existing hospitals, and office conversions"
- Since this application was originally filed a few months before the province approved The London Plan in 2016, the city is required to use the official plan of the day which was the 1989 plan. That plan identifies this site as "Low Density Residential"
- Even though The London Plan can't be used for this one, the report also states that this application is not in conformity of that either mainly because College Avenue is classified as a "Neighbourhood Street", which is the lowest possible classification a street can get (for context: same classification as many of the less busy courts, crescents, etc we see in subdivisions), and buildings fronting onto these can only have a maximum height of 3 stories... but once again The London Plan can't be used in this application
Funny enough, I thought for sure that this application would be recommended to proceed since there are several buildings of similar height in the area, and it is close to the university, but I was wrong.
Will be interesting to hear the Council discussion, but either way it does not really matter as the OLT will have the final say.
OLT process can often take 18 plus months unless the appeal is dropped or in the best case the OLT rejects the appeal from the get go. The OLT needs to be much more proactive in terms of rejecting junk appeals in order to reduce their backlog and workload.
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