City mulls streamlined development approval process
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN December 22, 2013 5:20 PM
OTTAWA - A simpler way of saying yes or no to contentious development projects is catching on across Ontario, and Ottawa’s chief planning official in charge of reviewing them wants to take a look at it here.
Ontario has allowed "development permits" since 2007 as a complete alternative to the urban-planning system we have now. So far they’ve only been picked up by small towns, but it’s making urban planners buzz - and Toronto is on the verge of trying them out as an experiment.
The way urban planning works now, more or less, is that the city has a big land-use plan it updates once every five years. It has a zoning code that’s supposed to follow the land-use plan but put in a lot more details. And it has standards for site plans, which spell out things like where driveways can go and what direction a building’s ventilation fans point. If you want to build something, you have to meet all three sets of standards.
Or you can ask to have the standard amended in your favour. That is where the fighting happens, with the yelling in community-centre auditoriums and angry remonstrations to city council’s planning committee. That is where the city is so often criticized for not enforcing its own rules, agreeing constantly to changes in developers’ favour.
"The city is not entertaining amendments. The city is OBLIGATED to process applications for amendments," says Michael Mizzi, the city’s chief of development review, whom Ottawa hired away from Toronto early in 2013. Under the system Ottawa uses, spelled out in provincial law, rezonings are an integral part of urban planning and anybody is entitled to seek one. "The system we have now has the consultation and review in the middle or really at the end of the process. It pushes everything right to the end, and you have arguments about specific plans and the policies that allow them as a result."
Ottawa has been trying to push a lid down on these fights, investing heavily in things called "community design plans." They’re supposed to get out ahead of development pressures and involve residents, local merchants, and would-be developers in deciding the futures of neighbourhoods. A quick one takes about a year. When it’s done, it’s supposed to take a long view of where a neighbourhood is headed and, because of all the consultations that go into them - pushed to an earlier stage, the thinking goes - they’re supposed to represent a community consensus.
The problem: A community-design plan doesn’t solve everything. It can still be appealed or amended. Some are written more firmly than others. Some have built-in flexibility that leaves a lot of judgments up to the city’s planning department, such as one for Wellington Village that the city decided in December allows a nine-storey building on a lot residents thought could only have six. After five years or so, developers and their lawyers start arguing that they’re obsolete. They often argue that the zoning doesn’t match the plan - figuring out how land-use plans, zoning and site plans fit together, and where there’s a mismatch that might be exploited, is a small industry.
People who are just trying to get a grip on what’s happening down the block from their homes are easily stymied. Often neighbours argue against rezonings because they’re worried about things like where garbage will be stored, only to be told that that’s a site-plan question, not a zoning issue. Those get dealt with later, behind closed doors.
That’s where a development-permit system looks interesting. It wraps all the approvals into one application instead of three. One application, one set of rules, dealt with all at once.
It takes an enormous amount of work up front, far more than even a full community design plan needs. "You’ve got to know exactly what you’re looking for, almost on a lot-by-lot basis," Mizzi says. But if you do, you can spell it out in great detail, and then tell a developer pretty easily whether a proposal meets the standard. "If not, you can’t do it. You can’t do it. There is not an option to apply for a rezoning or a minor variance."
On the flip side, there’s also not an option for a neighbour to appeal an approval. If it meets the standards, it can be built, period.
The Ontario Association of Architects suggested development permits last fall as a possible solution to slow planning approvals in many cities and towns. Vice-president Toon Dreessen, who works in Ottawa, said having just one approval would avoid a lot of conflicts that can frustrate even projects nobody much objects to.
"It streamlines the process. It’s not about making it faster, it’s about making it clearer," he said. Currently, one proposal can be circulated to the same people and institutions for comments three times, once at each approval stage, and people are constantly checking each other’s work. Hydro Ottawa, for instance, might have different people signing off on the same plans and they won’t always agree on what’s OK. Something that was fine at the zoning stage becomes a problem in the site plan, and then fixing it means going back and changing the zoning to allow the fix.
"You go through the whole planning approval process and they do another zoning check, and then you have to argue about stuff," he said. "You get into, oh, gee, I have to change the site design, and it spirals, and you get this whole mess ... [A development permit system] puts all those circulation processes into one circulation."
For residents and community associations, it means one chance to comment on a project instead of two or three, but nobody will get scolded for bringing up a concern at the wrong stage in the process.
After a slow start in Ontario - a test in three Ontario municipalities starting in 2000 led only Lake of Bays, a township of 3,500 people in Muskoka, to stick with it - the development-permit idea is getting more traction. Near Ottawa, Carleton Place and Gananoque have adopted it; Mizzi points out it’s in use only in pretty small municipalities so far. Few big-city planners have practical experience with it.
But the big deal is that Toronto is interested: its chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, is a fan of the idea and its city council’s planning committee told her this month to report back in April with both a policy proposal and a plan to test-drive it in a downtown neighbourhood around King Street and Spadina Avenue.
Mizzi’s idea is that in Ottawa, we’d try it out in a well-established area that isn’t in the middle of a building boom. He shies away from naming one.
"I don’t think it’s something you want to pilot in an area undergoing great change," he says. "Possibly in a heritage conservation district ... somewhere where it’s a little more known what the built form is."
But even such a neighbourhood would have enough renovations and teardowns to tell us useful things about how development permits would work, Mizzi says.
He emphasizes that he isn’t championing a development-permit system. He’s saying it’s interesting enough to look at. With a major review of the city’s official land-use plan and policies just completed, something Ottawa does once every five years, the soonest anything could likely be in place is 2018, though Mizzi intends to bring it up after the city election next fall as a subject for his department to study.
[email protected]
ottawacitizen.com/greaterottawa
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa...ment+approval+process/9316100/story.html
Prev
Linear Mode
