Committee laments public’s apathy on city’s official plan
On the subject of legal pot and the future of a roof-mounted plastic cow in Orléans, Ottawa residents have made their opinions known. Not so much, at least not historically, on the development of an official plan that serves as the blueprint for Ottawa’s future.
And that’s a problem, planning committee members heard Thursday.
“I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if you’re grasping how vitally important this is going to be,” said Jan Harder, Barrhaven Ward councillor and planning committee chair.
The committee approved the work plan for the city’s new official plan at its Thursday meeting. Public engagement on the official plan is scheduled to begin this month, with the new plan adopted by council and approved by the province by the end of 2021.
“This is the most exciting thing happening in this city. It’s planning our future, my grandchildren’s future, (your) grandchildren’s future,” Harder said.
The official plan sets out a policy framework to guide Ottawa’s physical development — from land-use planning to infrastructure and community development to natural resource management — for the next two-and-a-half decades.
“I want people to wake up. I want people to get engaged,” Harder said. “Intensity fires the process.”
Coun. Rick Chiarelli pointed out to his fellow planning committee members that more than 20,000 responses were submitted for a city survey on private cannabis retail in Ottawa.
After that, the second-largest consultation response Chiarelli said he’d seen, “was for that rooftop cow in Orléans where we got nearly 10,000 people writing in to save the thing … our last official plan got a tiny fraction of that.”
As the Cheddar Et Cetera bovine situation demonstrated, engagement won’t necessarily come from telling people how important a city initiative is — it has to strike a nerve, Chiarelli said.
As Harder explained, the current official plan dates back to 2003, shortly after the City of Ottawa’s amalgamation. She said the relative disinterest in the official planning process at the time could be attributed to amalgamation-era feelings of disconnect. But kids who in the past would have said they were from Nepean will now tell the councillor they’re from Barrhaven or Ottawa, Harder said. “This is the city that they want.”
And engagement with its official plan’s development is vital for their future and the city’s future, she noted.
“We’ve got to get this right because we’re going to go from being the fifth-largest city in Canada to maybe the 10th-largest city in Canada if we’re not smart about it, and that takes options and choices away from you.”
As was pointed out by Stephen Willis, the city’s general manager of planning, infrastructure and economic development, “the pace of social and technological change has increased so rapidly in the last 50 years that the plans we have done have had trouble keeping up.”
If this trend persists into the future, it could spell real trouble for Ottawa, city staff and councillors heard at a presentation by Joe Berridge, an urban planner and partner at city building firm Urban Strategies.
He observed that the world is getting “spiky,” meaning that fewer and fewer cities are coming to matter more and more. And what distinguishes a leading city is population growth, immigration, universities, hospitals, transit, libraries, all areas in which Ottawa needs to invest attention and resources to get or stay ahead of the pack.
The city’s new official plan will provide that blueprint “for how we move the city forward into the 21st century,” said John Smit, city director of economic development and long-range planning.
The city will begin its consultation on the new official plan by collecting feedback on discussion papers it is slated to release this month that will cover such topics as the economy, housing and rural Ottawa. Engagement will be conducted through the city’s website, social media accounts and community events.
There will also be targeted engagement with specific groups of “traditionally under-represented” stakeholders, Willis promised.