Ottawa's set to try almost anything to get more patios, except cut sky-high permit fees
David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: February 6, 2017 | Last Updated: February 6, 2017 3:47 PM EST
A final report on how to get more pubs and restaurants to open patios in Ottawa is due at city hall this month, but it won’t include talk of lowering permit prices that are 10 times what Toronto charges.
We’ve learned some things about patios by trying out more little narrow ones on Elgin Street the past couple of years, and now we want to put those lessons to use. We’re writing a whole new bylaw specifically for patios. The new rules are expected to preserve wider corridors for pedestrians to get past and to restrict sandwich-board advertising, while allowing patios to be away from a restaurant’s front door (if there’s enough room) and permitting umbrellas to extend over a sidewalk as long as they’re high enough.
But they’ll still be expensive. Re-examining the price of a patio was off-limits.
Ottawa charges just under $200 per square metre for patios that encroach on city property, which is many of them. Torontonians have just shot down a city-staff trial balloon that proposed hiking fees there from as little as $20 per square metre to as much as $296 per square metre.
The city government’s licensing department presented its work in a public meeting there last week, everyone including Mayor John Tory freaked out, and they’re giving it a re-think before coming back for a city council decision in April.
Toronto’s patio fees are very low now, having been set in the 1990s and increased only to keep pace with inflation. In Montreal, patio fees are set by borough councils and they often use complicated formulas based on frontage and effects on parking. Downtown Ville-Marie — which covers Old Montreal and the Quartier des spectacles — offers a sample calculation for potential terrasse operators that works out to about $65 per square metre.
Westmount charges about what Ottawa does. Guess where the terrasses are. In Montreal, by the way, patios could only be on private property until a decade ago, thanks to the stuffiness of Jean Drapeau, who disdained drinking out of doors (also food carts). Since Montreal legalized them, they’ve sprouted by the dozen.
Here, we re-set our rates in 2014, cutting them from $232 to $208 per square metre, then nipped them again in 2015. That’s why they aren’t being reconsidered now.
Two strange things in our city’s thinking about this.
First, we set the price of patio encroachments according to how much money we want to make, not according to what they cost the city to clean around or to enforce bylaws around them — to handle noise complaints from neighbours, make sure there’s enough room on the sidewalks to get past, and so on. In 2014, the rationale for cutting the fees was that the city had expected to make $577,000 in patio fees but actually made $677,000. So it decided to trim the price.
In other words, we’re a bit confused about what we’re charging for. Is this a cost-covering administrative fee? Rent for the private use of publicly owned space? Bit of both?
If the fee is rent, does it make sense to charge exactly the same price no matter where the patio is? (No.) Does it matter that active street life is a specific goal for the city? (It should.)
Second, we’re operating on the belief that the price of a patio permit has little impact on whether restaurateurs open patios.
“It is the staff opinion that the demand for sidewalk space is inelastic in the majority of downtown areas, and the number of patios will not increase as a direct result of reduction in fees,” Ottawa’s planning department reported in 2015. They’d experimented with cutting the patio fee in half for locations on Preston Street and got only two new patios out of it, which was just in keeping with patio growth elsewhere in the city.
Well, sure, Preston Street. Several thousand dollars in fees makes a difference in marginal cases, not in neighbourhoods already established as entertainment and dining districts. Try it on Beechwood Avenue or in Lowertown outside the Market, say, and we might get better intel on what cheaper fees would do in places that aren’t already close to peak patio.
Ottawa has moved in the right direction, but our patio fees are still pretty high, especially compared with two nearby cities that have street life we envy. Easing the technical restrictions is good, but the thousands of dollars a permit costs probably has more to do with our paucity of patios than the city would like to admit.
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