- Joint Meeting of Saskatoon City Council and The Council of the R.M. of Corman Park at 12:00 noon, TCU Place
Planning agreement 'new phase' for region
City, Corman Park rules mean development 'certainty' in buffer zone
By David Hutton, The StarPhoenix June 28, 2010
Longtime Saskatoon planner Bert Wellman recalls, in the mid-1950s, walking for miles around the outskirts of the city completing city hall's secret inventory of what existed in Cory, the surrounding municipality now known as Corman Park.
With no regulations governing development in the area, what Wellman discovered during his six months of daily walks east of present-day Preston Avenue and west of Avenue W -- and everywhere in between -- was a planner's nightmare: Shabby, dug-in shacks without water or sewer and long stretches of unregulated growth.
"It was totally haphazard," said Wellman, 79. "It was primitive."
After Wellman's study was discovered by Cory administration, rural politicians demanded answers of the city's secret growth agenda.
When tempers cooled, however, public meetings were held and, soon after, a mutual agreement was formed, striking the first planning agreement between Saskatoon and its neighbour that regulated what could be developed outside the city limits.
The city needed room to grow, Wellman said, and couldn't run into haphazard planning along the way. Led by Wellman, the agreement was updated once again in the early 1980s when the partners, wary of developers looking to build around the city's outskirts, decided not to allow any dense residential or commercial areas within one mile of the city limits.
"Urban growth should be within the city and anything else that goes out into Corman Park should be rural," Wellman said.
Council members from Saskatoon and the RM of Corman Park, the 2,000 square-kilometre municipality that surrounds the city, will vote today on a historic agreement that will eliminate that long-standing one-mile development buffer zone between the city and the municipality that encircles it, beginning the next phase of growth for the region and expanding on the work set in motion by Wellman's walk 55 years ago.
The agreement, a bylaw change to the Corman Park-Saskatoon community plan, sets out where future developments will be allowed in the area surrounding Saskatoon, paving the way for commercial, industrial and residential project spots previously off limits because of the regulations.
"(The one-mile buffer zone) was a simple policy to administer but it doesn't really address some of the situations where a proposal might actually work," said Laura Hartney, manager of Saskatoon's future growth section. "There's no magic to that distance. It was just simple to apply and so we wanted to look at something that would still be predictable but would also be flexible."
The buffer zone, in place since 1983, prevents large-scale residential and commercial developments in a 1.6- kilometre area around Saskatoon's city limits. The idea was to protect the area where Saskatoon would grow from developments that wouldn't fit with the city's plans. The new plan was initiated four years ago after the quagmire Saskatoon and Corman Park were in during the development of the Willows area, a proposal that forced the city to annex land to provide infrastructure to homes once thought impossible to service.
The new land use map still restricts development in areas where Saskatoon plans to grow for the next 75 years, primarily to the north and east of the city limits where nine new neighbourhoods are planned.
However, the city and Corman Park have now slated several areas in the planning district, primarily to the south, for future residential and commercial developments. The philosophy is to ensure developments are in areas close to existing roads that could be easily serviced, Hartney said.
The changes will likely clear the way for the redevelopment of Greenbryre Country Club, off Highway 16, which is expected to become an estates-style neighbourhood surrounding a scaled-back golf course. The course's owner can now submit a proposal for the development.
The agreement will allow Corman Park planners something more concrete when dealing with development applications, which have increased as the city has grown, said Bill Delainey, Corman Park senior planner.
There have been long debates about allowing urban-style developments such as apartment towers in Corman Park, but the new bylaw entrenches that housing be more rural and the focus will remain on expanding industrial and commercial endeavours, Delainey said.
Even potential commercial centres will be limited so big-box supercentres or supermarkets -- Walmart, Costco or Ikea, for example -- couldn't spring up as they are better suited for Saskatoon proper. Having city residents driving to the outskirts for groceries isn't sustainable planning, Delainey said.
"The greatest benefit is it provides a great deal of certainty that wasn't there before," Delainey said. "By providing certainty we are in a position now to do some long-range planning."
Both parties want to see residential and commercial developments clustered together and not spread throughout the region to take advantage of economies of scale, Hartney said.
"If we know where we're headed for the next 75 years then there are things that can be done in places where the city doesn't plan to grow," Hartney said.
"This really marks a new phase in the relationship between the two communities."
The plan drives home how the two areas aren't thinking in competitive terms and chasing the tax base that comes with development dollars in projects that don't make sense in a rural setting, Delainey said.
"Councils often look at the big dollars that could be brought in through tax revenue as opposed to looking at what benefits the region," he said. "This (plan) benefits the region."
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