Slow approvals cost millions, architects warn

Bureaucrats suggest developers’ sloppy applications are at fault

Slow approvals of new construction projects cost Ontarians hundreds of thousands of dollars for each month of delay, says a study conducted for the Ontario Association of Architects, but when asked who’s responsible, developers and cities point fingers at each other.

Site-plan approval is a level of planning oversight between a basic building permit and a rezoning, mostly to do with how a project will affect neighbours. It looks at things like where parking will go and how people will get in and out, drainage, where garbage will be kept, and landscaping — how a building sits on the property that holds it.

‘You might get approval in four months for your site-plan approval, but then it sits in Legal for two months.’

But that oversight is not applied consistently, says the architects’ report. “This results in unpredictability, confusion and frustrations for applicants and consultants as the process differs considerably among (and often within) municipalities.”

Ottawa’s record on approving site plans is abysmal by even the city’s own standards. The city’s target varies depending on how complicated the application is, but it is typical to process 80 per cent of the site-plan applications it gets within two to three months. The city’s planning department managed to do so only 30 per cent of the time in the second quarter of this year, the latest for which it has reported results, and in three years has never managed to hit the quarterly target on even half the applications it gets.

The delays cost everybody, according to the architects’ association study. Would-be builders sit on land they’d rather be developing and selling; would-be buyers wait in second-class properties they’d rather move out of; municipalities spend money on planning officials’ time instead of collecting property taxes. The study says each month a 100-unit condo building is delayed costs the builder $193,000, purchasers $2,375 each, and municipalities $159,900 to $241,600. Delayed commercial buildings come with similar costs and more, because employers wait to hire the workers.

That’s all in addition to the cost of applying for site-plan approval in the first place (which can be tens of thousands of dollars), plus all the reports a would-be builder might have to supply, from traffic studies to geotechnical examinations.

“It takes small-niche projects and makes it not viable because the cost is so disproportionate to the project,” said Toon Dreessen, an Ottawa architect who’s also a vicepresident of the provincial association. Only big builders can afford to take the chances the process demands, which means it promotes big projects, not tiny perfect ones.

Whose fault is a slow approval? Builders say it’s that cities move slowly. Cities say the issue is that builders file crummy applications.

Developers say the sheer number of departments that get a say in approving a site plan is the single biggest complaint that came up in the architects’ survey, with slow response times and conflicting demands from the different departments coming second and third. One department might say the lane for a new factory needs drainage ditches in the same places another department says the parking-lot driveways should go, for instance, and the developer has to sort out the dispute.

“You might get approval in four months for your siteplan application, but then it sits in Legal for two months,” Dreessen said.

Sometimes city officials decide politicians need to get involved. Councillors ordinarily get to sign off on site-plan applications in their wards, in place of whole council votes, but Dreessen said it sometimes amounts to more than that.

A parallel survey of municipalities’ planning bosses cites slow responses from developers to city comments and requests as the biggest problem, followed by incomplete applications. Slow-grinding bureaucracy comes third.

In Ottawa’s case, the city already does many of the things the architects recommend for speeding things up. Nearly all site-plan applications are handled by planning officials and never need a city council vote, for instance. But there’s a catch: most of those in Ottawa aren’t handled by rankand-file staff but by a smaller number of managers in the planning department, because they’re considered too complex for just anybody to process. These are also the applications that take the very longest to process, with only 19 per cent of them last year wrapped up within the most generous deadline the city offers itself, 74 days from the time they come in.

Ottawa’s planners have got better at explaining what local builders need to do in advance, Dreessen said, which speeds things along, but there’s still a long way to go.