OMB should work better as Liberals undertake changes
The Ontario government wants to give cities more power to control urban development — but it’s putting off, at best, plans to neuter the Ontario Municipal Board and require developers to build cheaper housing.
New rules promised Thursday by Municipal Affairs Minister Ted McMeekin sweep aside a much more aggressive effort by Liberal backbencher Peter Milczyn, through a bill he introduced in the legislature last fall. But when the minister’s behind it, it’s pretty definitely going to happen.
McMeekin’s amending the rules that underlie practically every fight we have over new condo buildings or new suburban subdivisions.
“We’re ensuring that community feedback is always front and centre when it comes to development that’s coming to our community,” says Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi, who’s worked with McMeekin on the changes.
As it stands, the province requires cities to update their master urban-planning documents every five years. McMeekin wants them to last 10 years, and to protect those official plans from appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board — which can change them or outright overturn them — for two years after they’ve been passed. It’s an effort to promote “predictability,” Naqvi says.
After years of consultations and drafting and redrafting, it’s totally routine for official plans to be appealed as soon as they’re passed if they include things builders don’t like, which they always do. Dealing with the appeals can take as long as making up the plans does in the first place, and it happens in hearings and negotiations that are practically opaque to the folks who happen to inhabit the place whose future is being planned. In Ottawa’s case, the Ontario Municipal Board a few years ago rejected a major effort to rein in urban sprawl, opening 1,100 hectares of new suburbs to construction against city council’s wishes. Under McMeekin’s changes, there would be this twoyear waiting period, but the same thing could still happen.
This is one of the major differences between the old bill and the new one: Milczyn wanted to have the municipal board make decisions “consistent with” city councils’ votes, instead of merely having to acknowledge those votes happened before overturning them. McMeekin is keeping the old rules. His legislation also doesn’t deal what’s called “inclusionary zoning.” Milczyn’s bill would have let cities force developers to include cheaper units in their projects, to make them more “inclusive” to people with less money. Housing advocates see it as a big part of solving homelessness.
Naqvi says both municipalboard reforms and inclusionary zoning remain on the government’s to-do list. The Liberals just want to have more consultations first. Inclusionary zoning, in particular, will come up as part of the government’s plan to tackle homelessness, he says.
For a long time, Ottawa has also wanted a change to development charges — fees put on new construction to cover the costs it brings to cities, like a need for new police stations and libraries and bus routes to serve new residents — and it’s getting that, too.
The province is doing away with a rule that says development charges for transit have to be based on what a city has provided for the previous 10 years. It’s caused Ottawa headaches as the city tries to pay for a $2.1-billion upgrade to light rail with development charges set based on a transit system that uses muchcheaper buses.
“Ottawa and Waterloo region have been arguing that they haven’t had LRT before, so they don’t have that data, so that undermines them in planning their new transit systems,” Naqvi says.
With new power does comes new responsibility, particularly when it comes to making cities explain what they’re doing with the new money they’ll be able to extract from developers (and, by extension, the buyers of the condos and houses they build). That spending is hard to track and the province says cities will have to account for it better.
Overall, while the changes McMeekin is proposing aren’t nearly as radical as the ones Milczyn — and larger cities all across Ontario — wanted, they are an improvement over what we’ve got now. Councillors’ votes on development issues will mean more, and they’ll have more authority to raise money for big projects they consider worthwhile.
They’ll also have to answer for those decisions to their voters, with a bit less room to hide behind the OMB. Milczyn’s bill would have taken away almost all that cover, but at least this is a start.