O-train corridor plan delayed and split into 3 parts

Redevelopment plans for most of the O-Train corridor between Little Italy and Hintonburg, which the city has been working on since 2005, are set to be delayed another year.

The Carling-Bayview Community Design Plan is supposed to guide the slow conversions of industrial lots by the former freight line into modern downtown condos and businesses. The city started on it when the line was going to be the spine of a new north-south light-rail system, then backed off when city council canned that system in 2006.

Work on the plan didn’t seriously resume until a year ago, when city council committed to the east-west line that’s about to begin preliminary construction.

Now, according to a presentation prepared by a city planner working on the study and obtained by the Citizen, the plan is to be broken into three parts: One for the area around the Bayview station, one for the Carling station, and one for the Gladstone area in between, which doesn’t have a station now but is expected to get one eventually.

Only one chunk, the one for Bayview station, is to be finished this spring, when the full plan was supposed to be done. The portion for the Carling station, which includes a look at the south end of Preston Street nearby, is due at the end of the year and the Gladstone section won’t be done until February 2014.

That’s a problem, said Somerset Councillor Diane Holmes, the western edge of whose ward is covered by the plan. “Really, the planning department deals with planning for development applications that have been received,” she said. “There is no REAL planning, nobody sitting down and doing neighbourhood planning to make up our minds in advance.”

The O-Train has kept rolling, carrying more and more people, development has hit the north and south ends of the corridor, around the Bayview and Carling stations, and the city is rushing to catch up. It had to freeze approvals around the Carling station late last year because applications were coming in too fast to cope with, and bring in a consultant to come up with a concept plan just for that area, one that hasn’t yet been debated.

“They don’t have the staff,” Holmes said, with some sympathy. “The whole planning department is paid for by development, by the fees that come with applications, and they don’t have the staff to really do other things.”

The city’s urban-planning department spends about $21 million a year and actually turns a profit of about $500,000.