Planning chair defends planner

Hume says staffer’s project is not a conflict of interest

Objections to a city planner’s private development project are nothing but cynical attempts to destroy the credibility of the City of Ottawa’s planning department, the chair of the city council committee that oversees it says.

“I think it’s about politics. I think it’s all about politics,” Coun. Peter Hume said Tuesday. Community activists in the neighbourhoods west of downtown don’t like the city’s planning policies and they’re going after a staff planner whose job it is to apply them, he said.

City planner Bliss Edwards, whose day job is reviewing rezoning proposals in urban Ottawa, has been under fire for a side project that she, her husband and her parents coown at 433 Dawson Ave., near Byron and Kirkwood avenues, in which they took an old house and added a major new addition that they’re now trying to sever and sell separately.

It needs the zoning rules bent to allow it — permission for which the foursome applied after the addition was built instead of before. It was approved as a “secondary unit,” the label for a granny suite or basement apartment, not for an addition larger than the original house. And the name Edwards used on the application was Inez Margaret Gloyn, a combination of her given names and married last surname, none of which she uses professionally.

In a previous interview, Edwards told the Citizen the need to sever and sell half the new building came up after the construction project ended up being a lot more expensive than it was supposed to be, and wasn’t part of the original plan. She needs zoning variances because of an error in pouring the foundation for the addition and because the city’s rules on the sizes of new garage doors don’t deal well with buildings like hers, where one semi-detached unit backs onto the side of the other. Her use of another name was meant to keep her colleagues in the city’s planning department from realizing they were dealing with an application from a co-worker, she said — an attempt to avoid trading on her position, rather than an attempt to conceal it.

Edwards also co-owns a rental property near 433 Dawson and has gone to the Ontario Municipal Board to get permission to break up a property on Fisher Avenue.

“I don’t see a conflict” between Edwards’s side projects and her work for the city, Hume said. “You have to be able to, in my opinion, access all the processes that are available to the general public.”

Hume rejects the idea that Edwards’ bosses erred when they assigned her to review a proposed condo building at nearby 236 Richmond Rd. The president of the local community association, Lorne Cutler, said that put his group in the untenable position of wanting to object to the zoning changes Edwards needed for her personal project while also making submissions to her as a public official.

Hume said he doesn’t listen to Lorne Cutler. It was to Edwards’s credit that she asked to have the rezoning for 236 Richmond Rd. taken off her plate when her involvement became a point of controversy, he said, but there’d be nothing for anyone to worry about anyway because Edwards is a professional.

“In her professional capacity, she has to be able to say, ‘This is what they (the community association) said, this is why we think it isn’t an issue, or it is an issue,’” Hume said. The whole thing would be on the public record when the rezoning for 236 Richmond comes before his committee, he said.

As for the fact Edwards applied for the wrong kind of building permit, Hume said that what matters is that the plans fully described what ended up being built, even if they had the wrong label.

The whole thing, he said, is a phoney controversy.

“It’s a way to attack the credibility of the city’s planning department,” Hume said.

Edwards’ request to have the zoning rules tweaked for her property at 433 Dawson has been heard by the city’s committee of adjustment, which is expected to rule soon. Like bigger rezoning applications, the numerous smaller applications the committee of adjustment hears get recommendations from the city’s planning department on whether the committee should approve them.

The general manager in charge of the planning department, John Moser, told the Citizen earlier that the approvals for Edwards’s property at 433 Dawson have been handled by people with whom she doesn’t work directly.

“When the committee of adjustment application came in, it was not dealt with by the group that that person is in,” Moser said.

As it turns out, that’s only partly true. The staff planner dealing with Edwards’s case is Simon Deiaco, a senior planner who, like, Edwards, works in the “urban services” part of the development review branch of the planning department, but reports to a different manager. The staff recommendation that Edwards get the rule changes she needs to sell the halves of her newly expanded building separately has not only Deiaco’s name on it, but that of Don Herweyer, Edwards’s day-to-day boss.

Moser couldn’t explain why when asked on Tuesday but promised to look into it.