OMB kills Westboro highrises; blasts city for approving ‘flawed’ plan
Board rules planning department OK’d Roosevelt Avenue project for ‘non-existent’ reasons
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN February 21, 2014
OTTAWA — The city’s planners short-circuited public consultations and supported a developer’s plans to build two highrise towers in northwestern Westboro for no obvious reason, a devastating new Ontario Municipal Board ruling says.
In at least this specific case, according to the board, the city’s urban planning department did exactly what its critics accuse it of doing all the time: ignoring residents’ concerns and changing the rules to suit whatever builders want, pretending a major new project in a delicate neighbourhood could happen with just a technical tweak.
Uniform Urban Developments’ proposed project at 335 Roosevelt Ave. has been a soap opera for years. Boiled down, Uniform wanted to take a piece of land on the south side of the Transitway between Dominion and Westboro stations and construct 16- and 14-storey towers on it, instead of the wider, lower buildings that a specific plan for the neighbourhood called for. The taller towers would have the same number of units but they’d be slimmer and nicer-looking and would leave a lot more open space at ground level.
Yes, the neighbours said, but they’d loom over our houses. We don’t want them next door or down the block. And there’s a bigger point: These taller buildings are not what’s in the plan for our area, so why are you approving them?
“It goes much beyond our own community. It extends to the whole city,” said Gay Stinson, one of the group of residents that challenged the project. They raised $35,000 for the case and relied on discounts from lawyers and planners — including the city’s own former planning policy chief Dennis Jacobs, who’s now a freelance planning consultant.
They raise a great question, the ruling from OMB member Marc Denhez says, and the city’s planners didn’t seem to have an answer for it: “Though staff addressed many individual components of the project, the rationale for changing the mid-rise skyline itself was not just flawed; it was non-existent,” Denhez writes. “That slate was blank; and although it could have been corrected at the [OMB] hearing, it was not.”
There’s “essentially no visible indication” that the city’s planners spent any time thinking about their own policies when they decided Uniform should be allowed go ahead, Denhez finds. That won’t do.
It gets worse. The city’s lead planner charged with assessing Uniform’s project, Douglas James, had the file but sat on it for months, until Uniform got an automatic right to take it to the OMB because the city blew a legal deadline for making a decision, Denhez found. The project was probably going to end up in front of the board (which can overrule city councils’ decisions) anyway, but James’s handling of it meant the city didn’t bother with the public meetings and consultations that would have normally given residents a chance to have their say.
This serene disregard for what anybody except the professionals thought carried on in the city’s insistence that the planning documents describing what was allowed needed to be interpreted in a complicated way. Some of them conflicted and it’s true they needed to be sorted out, Denhez writes. But a map that seemed to clearly show what was allowed and what wasn’t? The planners just threw that out.
Denhez’s ruling is withering: “If the purpose of ‘planning’ is for municipalities and stakeholders to know what is expected of them, then it is the antithesis of that purpose to suppose that readers of normal intelligence are incapable of reading a map, that official documents do not mean what they say, or that predictability is impossible without resorting to the subjective interpretations of a handful of insiders,” he writes.
Whatever James was doing, it wasn’t planning in any legal sense, Denhez writes.
Thanks to Denhez, Uniform is going to be allowed to build more or less what the neighbours said it should be limited to: wide seven-storey buildings with rooftop features that go up to an eighth storey here and there.
“We’re delighted by the designation for the site itself and we’re delighted by the way in which this decision has counselled the city on what sort of principles it has to operate under when carrying out its own official plan and also what principles the city planning department ought to be following and remaining full of integrity,” Stinson said.
John Moser, the city’s general manager in charge of the planning department, said Friday he hadn’t read the ruling yet. John Smit, a subordinate who leads the group of planners that includes James, stuck up for him in an interview.
“I consider Doug to be a very qualified planner, very highly respected, and from my perspective he has in fact represented the city and the department and represented council’s position on the matter,” Smit said. “Every planner in the province of Ontario knows that when you’re in front of the board on zoning or an official-plan amendment, the arguments … need to be focused on policy. And it needs to be focused on policies that are approved by council through plans and secondary plans.”
Contrary to Denhez’s decision, Smit said, a lot of policy-based thought went into the department’s recommendation. The nature of an OMB hearing is usually that somebody wins and somebody loses, he said, and whoever loses ends up looking worse.
The city’s planners have done, and are doing, an enormous amount of work to make sure the conflicting policies that led to the confusion over this particular piece of property are ironed out, he said, so there won’t be reasons for this sort of dispute in the future.
“We need to put in place a zoning bylaw that actually implements the official plan,” he said. “We need to align the zoning bylaw better with the official plan than it has before or been today.”
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