By Josh McJannett
By approving a new package of incentives to help property owners clean up former landfills and gas stations across Ottawa, city council has acted responsibly to encourage the redevelopment of long-neglected prime real estate.
Under the new plan, the City of Ottawa will cover half the cost of cleaning up contaminated industrial sites, or brownfields, through tax incentives and by lowering development fees.
In the works for more than a year, the city’s new Brownfields Redevelopment Strategy is a responsible approach to revitalizing contaminated sites that stops short of offering developers a complete pass on the costs of clean-up.
The new incentives are in addition to the already reduced costs developers pay to buy contaminated sites from the city.
The plan is a drastic improvement over the initial proposal by city staff, which would have seen taxpayers shoulder the full cost of clean-up – charges that could have been more than $1-million for each of Ottawa’s estimated 100 brownfields.
City council’s approach is novel in that instead of intruding into the marketplace and using public funds to clean-up abandoned contaminated sites, our elected representatives have instead opted for a plan that gets government out of the way.
The plan promises to get the job done with the added benefit of stimulating the local economy by unleashing the potential of private investment.
The plan ensures tax dollars will be put to use where they will be most effective, namely delivering core municipal services – not digging holes across the city’s neglected industrial sites.
Instead of using publicly funded tractors and bulldozers to clean up abandoned gas pumps and decrepit warehouses, council’s approach encourages Ottawa developers to do the heavy lifting themselves with the prospect of profit as their reward.
City council has broken the mold in its latest approach to addressing a costly urban development challenge.
By creating progressive tax incentives and easing the red-tape burden on new construction, councillors have demonstrated a measure of faith in the capacity of private enterprise to develop cost-effective solutions to an expensive problem.
Developers with the foresight to recognize the potential payback of accepting the new incentives to take cheap land and turn it into valuable real estate will be well placed to profit from their efforts.
The clean-up plan is a major step in transforming Ottawa’s pockmarked streetscapes into bustling new residential and commercial districts.
In addition to making the city a brighter, more livable space, encouraging redevelopment makes good economic sense.
Brownfields are a drain on city coffers, while the new commercial and residential spaces that will replace them bring the promise of new sources of property tax revenue for a city struggling to balance budgets and maintain core services.
Ottawa’s new brownfields strategy is a demonstration of the kind of positive public-private solutions that exist for developing practical, cost-effective strategies to improve Ottawa.
The incentive package exemplifies the kind of common-sense approach councilors would be well-advised to employ elsewhere.
Taxpayers can celebrate a rare victory where, for once, the answer to an Ottawa problem wasn’t spending more of their hard-earned money.