Wednesday,
August 17, 2005
The city's smart-growth strategy is under attack
by the Ontario Municipal Board, which prefers
to have Ottawans live by eight-year-old planning
policies rather than today's more realistic
ideas about the future.
The OMB, which
can review municipal planning decisions, overruled
a city council decision on containing urban
sprawl in the west end last week.
The city wants
to preserve an agricultural buffer between Kanata
and Stittsville, while property developers want
to build subdivisions on that land. The OMB
sided with the developers, ripping a hole in
Ottawa's urban-growth boundary.
The boundary
is the key to the city's long-term planning
strategy: without it, there's nothing. The idea
is to halt urban sprawl by simply refusing to
permit significant development beyond a line
arcing from the western edge of Kanata, south
of Barrhaven and Riverside South, to the east
side of Cumberland. The closer people live together,
the cheaper it is to provide virtually every
city service, from water to transportation to
policing.
The city defined
that line in its 2003 official urban plan. Ottawa
had no such serious boundary in 1997, though,
when the pre-amalgamation regional council passed
its last official plan. That plan was pivotal
in the OMB's decision to let Westpark Estates,
Brookfield Homes and Del Corp. have hundreds
of hectares southwest of Glen Cairn turned from
farmland to subdivision.
To justify
its ruling, the OMB used population projections
from 2001, given in the new official plan --
the one with the urban-growth boundary -- to
decide that the city has an impending shortage
of land for single-family homes. So the high-end
numbers in the new plan are acceptable, but
the city's planning philosophy can be frozen
in 1997.
See if you
can understand the reasoning. The province requires
Ottawa to keep a 10-year supply of land available
for single-family homes, even though the city
has made a policy decision to discourage that
kind of housing. Numbers from 2001 suggested
explosive growth was imminent, even though that
didn't happen. Therefore, a set of rules from
1997, established by governments that no longer
exist and overtaken by new rules from a government
that does exist, have to be modified and given
force in 2005.
City councillors
are furious. Peggy Feltmate, who represents
Kanata Ward, is calling on her colleagues to
flex their political muscles by using a new
provision in the province's Planning Act that
gives councillors the final say over zoning
-- a finer matter than the big-picture official
plan -- to prevent new houses from being built.
(In fact, the revised act also protects official-plan
decisions, but the developers' appeals were
under way before the new act came into force
last November.)
Ms. Feltmate
is right: the regional government and city council
made decisions to keep land southwest of Glen
Cairn agricultural, and they shouldn't be second-guessed
by the unelected technocrats at the Ontario
Municipal Board.