Still awaiting approval, Ottawa's official plan is being scrutinized by the province — and mayoral candidates
Expanding the urban boundary is a high-stakes decision for developers and landowners, as well as for those concerned about the economic and environmental costs of sprawl.
Taylor Blewett
Oct 20, 2022 • 1 hour ago • 5 minute read
Nearly a year ago, Ottawa city council voted 21-2 to adopt a policy blueprint to guide the city’s development over the next quarter-century. The result of years of work, debate and deliberation, the city’s new official plan just needed a stamp of approval from the provincial minister of municipal affairs and housing.
But that still hasn’t happened, leaving the next council to deal with whatever the Ontario government decides to do with the multiple official plans sitting on its proverbial desk from Ottawa and other municipalities.
Meanwhile, major policy questions debated in the lead-up to settling on a new official plan — i.e. should the urban boundary expand? How should more homes be added to existing neighbourhoods? — have been reignited by mayoral candidates in the municipal election.
Bob Chiarelli and Catherine McKenney both oppose the decision council made on bringing new lands into city’s urban boundary, which defines the area where urban development, with major roads, transit and piped sewer and water service, is permitted. McKenney was among several council members who voted against the expansion ahead of approval of the new official plan.
Expanding the urban boundary is a high-stakes decision for developers and landowners, as well as for those concerned about the economic and environmental costs of sprawl, with the inclusion of a new community called Tewin in rural southeast Ottawa among the 1,281 hectares of expansion land drawing considerable criticism.
It was current councillors who opted to jettison land in west Ottawa that staff had scored higher for inclusion in the new urban boundary to make room for the Tewin lands, to be developed by Taggart Investments and the Algonquins of Ontario. It was a decision that blindsided developer-owners of the rejected land in the Kanata area; the province itself expressed qualms about the move in its comments on the city’s draft plan.
McKenney (who uses they/them pronouns) acknowledged in a recent interview that there’s no way for the city to undo the boundary expansion — unless the province agrees to it. But they defended their commitment to holding the boundary line.
“If the province comes back and approves the (official) plan as is, then that is what we’re stuck with. But I … have to hope that, you know, they’re looking at it and seeing that it is not affordable, it is unaffordable to expand the urban boundary, especially the Tewin/Taggart lands.”
Chiarelli is also hoping the province sees things his way when it comes to the city’s new official plan. He’s already written to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark, asking that he postpone approval of the city’s new official plan and allow the new council to review it and make changes. Chiarelli has said he wants to see the urban boundary expansion held back, except for those lands in the Kanata-South March area that were ditched for Tewin.
It is bothering some to see campaign-trail proposals to rework the official plan that Ottawa’s current council and the public spent years grappling with.
“We went through I don’t know how many public planning committee meetings and council meetings, and the democratically elected council here made some very difficult decisions on what we wanted the official plan to look like and guide the growth in our city,” said Stittsville Coun. Glen Gower, who is running for re-election.
“For people to come along and suggest I’m going to change this or change that, I mean, is circumventing … a good process, I think, that took a long time and a lot of work and a lot of conversations with community groups to come to a good decision.”
It’s not just mayoral candidates proposing changes to the new plan, however.
After its approval, local community leaders, as well as McKenney and several other councillors, sent letters to the minister about reconsidering the urban boundary expansion. Meanwhile, the local development community, via the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association, has impressed on the province its concerns that Ottawa isn’t adding enough land, and has also asked it to overturn a council decision that reduced the height permissions contemplated in the new official plan for what are called “minor corridors.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the ministry of municipal affairs and housing said it is “carefully reviewing each municipality’s official plan to ensure it best serves the long-term interests of Ontarians,” adding that “official plans are among the most important tools municipalities and the province use in partnership to prepare for our future housing needs.”
Planning committee co-chair and outgoing city councillor Scott Moffatt outlined the three general paths the province could take, when it comes to approving — or not approving — Ottawa’s new official plan and expanded urban boundary.
They could make the decision and any changes themselves, and this would be final. They could push anything they don’t want to decide over to the quasi-judicial Ontario Land Tribunal, which adjudicates planning matters. Or they could return anything they’ve deemed a problem area to the new city council for a decision, over which the province would still have the final say.
However the province decides to do to go about it, Moffatt expects it to come down on the side of Ottawa needing to allocate more land for development. But what he’d like to see is that it also consider “unlocking intensification potential” — like the eradication of R1 zoning, which restricts development on a given property lot in such zones to a single-detached home.
Moffatt argued that eliminating single-family zoning across the board is the easiest way to get the development the city needs — low-rise infill, gentle intensification — and by allowing it in every neighbourhood, “it’s less likely that any one community is going to be inundated with that type of growth.”
The future of R1 is a question the future mayor will have to stickhandle, even if the province doesn’t impose an answer on the city, which it could, as the next council is slated to decide how it wants to alter Ottawa’s existing zoning map to accommodate the housing needed for Ottawa’s projected population growth — 400,000 people and 195,000 homes by 2046, according to the city’s calculations — and achieve the targets in the new official plan.
While the three leading candidates for mayor have laid out different visions for how Ottawa should intensify, all have agreed that the urban boundary should not go any further than the new line the current council has drawn. However, Moffatt pointed out that adding more land is something the city could find itself having to do, even as early as the next council term, if it can’t achieve the intensification envisioned in the official plan.
In August, staff reported to council that the intensification seen between 2018 and 2021 exceeded the target in the new official plan. But that came with a major caveat: while apartment construction was humming along, the number of ground-oriented homes, like singles, semis, townhouses and low-rise apartments with larger units, were lagging the official plan target by about 385 units a year in the built-up areas of Ottawa.
Staff explained that, going forward, the new zoning bylaw would allow for a course correction –– and that bylaw will be the next council’s to write.
With files from Jon Willing
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...ral-candidates
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