CCCA wants Planning Act enforced

The Centretown Citizens Community Association is upset with the delay of a bylaw that would force developers to provide community benefits if they build residential or office towers past height and density limits.

Options for giving back to the community include adding green space, affordable housing units or even donating cash, according to a staff report on the bylaw.

"Planning for amenities like parks is based on land zoning in the community," explains CCCA president Charles Akben-Marchand. "If  buildings are built much bigger than that, the community has to absorb all those extra people and needs amenities."

Ontario cities can mandate these compensatory provisions under section 37 of the provincial Planning Act.

Ottawa adopted the section as a bylaw in 2003, but Akben-Marchand says the city chose to avoid implementing it until they could establish usage guidelines, hoping to mirror Toronto's success with the strategy.

Housing expert Catherine Boucher, former director of the non-profit housing group Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp., has monitored the Ontario capital’s use of section 37 projects.

"Toronto's gotten some excellent stuff out of their community benefits," she says, noting the creation of child-care centres, foot and bike paths, and affordable housing.

"All of that makes the community better for everybody, including the people developers are trying to attract to these buildings,” says Boucher. “It's a win-win situation."

City of Ottawa staff circulated a draft of proposed section 37 guidelines to the CCCA, developers and other community groups in May. They included having community consultations during city-developer negotiations over construction projects, stressing "high environmental standards," and preventing developments from counting "good architecture" as a benefit.

Staff  was supposed to forward the policy report to council in June, but developers requested a delay until August. Staff recently said the report was delayed again some time this fall, says Akben Marchand.

He claims developers have pressured city planners to stall section 37 to avoid splitting part of their budget for community benefits.

 "Part of it is the nature of the beast," he says. "Developers are the ones who are putting up the money to build all these expensive projects."

Planning committee chair Peter Hume says city officials, not developers, are behind the delays.

"When the city was putting together the policy, the development industry asked for a window of opportunity to provide some advice to the city on how section 37 could be applied successfully," Hume says.

"So any delay is not the fault of the development industry but the result of city staff needing more time to get it right."

Hume says the guidelines are tentatively on the agenda for the next planning meeting on Oct. 11.

Akben-Marchand says Ottawa needs to use section 37 now.

"It's unfortunate that we have so many planning applications under way while we're still working out the details on how it's going to take place," he says, stressing that Ottawa's section 37 policy will give local residents greater say in city-developer negotiations.

"We need to make sure people know they can and should get involved in the process, because by the time they see what gets built and they don't like it, it's much too late."