Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
It is a fundamentally unbalanced process because delays are always in favour of the opponents. The large amounts of evidence are essentially an attempt at fillibustering and should not be allowed. The reality is that most of the projects that are appealed are relatively simple and there is no way that each requires years of deliberation to decide whether it should be built or not.
I think there should be a process for appeals but that the present one is highly flawed - it's just way, way too slow. A delay of up to a year or so is long but workable. When you hit 5-10 year delays for developments (this happens in Halifax) it gets to the point where developers can't reasonably anticipate eventual economics, project costs balloon, and a lot of development is just not feasible anymore. The city suffers from this kind of burdensome regulatory environment.
Something else to keep in mind is that some of the HRM decisions made little sense. This was particularly bad back when the Peninsula Community Council made decisions about large developments in the core. It took only 2 votes to torpedo the Brewery tower (4 people and a tie results in denial of the development agreement). This process was later changed so that HRM council votes on developments, but I'm not sure that makes sense either. I think that council should focus on higher level planning guidelines and that individual applications should be handled quickly in a routine manner by city staff.
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I've thought about the appeals process for sometime and I don't think any appeal process will work perfectly; because ultimately its a crap shoot. You roll the dice and see what happens.
The downtown planning process going to regional council is probably a more balanced approach; because it gives more of the region an opportunity to have a say. That's the whole point of being a
regional municipality - is that each region should have some say in another. Whether that's what is happening or not is another question.
I think the problem with planning as a whole is that because policy is now an absolute; you will never truely have one interpretation. Here's an example:
"Create liveable communities" - I pulled that from a random policy document, not in HRM. So what does that mean to you? I'm willing to be that there will be common elements that we can all agree on, but others were don't. For example - to me a liveable community is about creating vibrant, walking/biking centres where you have a good mix of housing in all forms, all scales that promote vibrant commercial areas and that have many local services (such as schools) nearby. I've written that in the most general, because I'm sure we'd all agree. But the momment I say the scale means up to 100 storeys; then all of a sudden that changes.
Interpretation is never easy and since legal issues get thrown in; you can expect the process to get more complicated than easy.
That being said - maybe what the developers should be doing is really going over the appeal decisions with a fine toothed comb. If the appeal boards find that an appeal was lodged with the intent to delay or be problematic; then I think they should start taking these people to court.
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