PelhamToday received the following letter to the editor from a reader regarding development in the Niagara region and beyond:
Doug Ford and his dictatorial and undemocratic legislation regarding governance and development make him the man and provincial government we all despise, and rightly so.
However, to ignore the extreme hypocrisy shown by many of our elected politicians and planning staff, who pretend they are just as horrified as the rest of us, deserves at least some skepticism and a few questions. Planning staff are already stating that they will be needing additional planning staff to address the impact of Bill 23 on their current municipal planning policies. Surprise! Surprise!
Before any municipality agrees to any such staff increases shouldn’t we at least explore just what our planning staff do as they go about their work, compared with what they are employed to do by us residents, who pay them to work in our interests rather than those of developers?
Each municipal council, under the Municipal Act, is their municipality’s sole planning authority, the only body empowered to approve or reject or suggest amendments to recommendations put to them by planning staff and based on the municipality’s Official Plan, the Region’s Official Plan and provincial policies.
Whilst many councils claim they may be overruled by the Region and/or the province it does not absolve them of the oath of office they take to serve their community. That should include at least making an attempt to support the views of their residents rather than simply ignoring them.
Additionally, each municipal council approves and appoints a number of their residents to the Committee of Adjustment, a quasi-judicial and independent committee, who, from time to time are asked to hear certain specific and supposedly relatively minor planning issues, usually recommended by the planner, to decide, independently, whether they should be approved or rejected.
As a CoA acts directly for council, in any sort of normal world we might expect that a CoA’s decision should be accepted as if it were made by the elected council?
Then we come to a municipality’s planning staff.
Chosen by our elected council and employed and paid for by the municipality’s residents, and mandated to ensure that any planning application submitted to them complies with all existing Official Plans, zoning bylaws and provincial policies that apply to a specific municipality, no more, no less.
Now it would be dumb to ignore the fact that development continues to be a pretty dynamic industry with new methods and new materials making some changes not only necessary but also positive, so it is inevitable that plans and bylaws and provincial policies do need upgrading and amending from time to time.
But that is not the job of any municipal planner—their only job is to ensure a planning application does not conflict with existing planning policies within the municipality they work for.
Planning is a very secretive world, the world of municipal planners, and oftentimes from a planning application landing on their desks, where every planning application does land first, there may be weeks, months and even years before anyone, resident and taxpayer in the municipality, even at times, the municipal council, gets to hear a planning staff report at a council meeting recommending they approve a planning application that no one has heard about!
It probably begins with a phone call from a developer to a planner, possibly even before a developer commits himself to buying the proposed development site he is asking about. As they don’t appear to be recorded or made public it’s impossible to know just how many of these pre-planning consultations take place or what agreements the developer and planner come to?
But, if we assume that developers aren’t necessarily stupid it is pretty safe to assume that if they go forward, buy their nice clean piece of agricultural land, then submit a planning application, it is primarily because they believe that when they submit their planning application it will be approved?
I do know of one ‘developer’ who did have a pre-planning consult with a planner regarding ten acres of agricultural zoned land. So far, several months later, there is no application for the condo he plans on building but immediately after that pre-planning consult the property appeared on a realty site with three of the ten single lots offered as investment lots at around $150,000 each with the entire ten-acre site still listed at $3,700,000. I guess that’s the modern planner’s idea of good planning?
And when an application does appear on a council’s agenda, first, few councillors really bother to read the agenda ahead of any meeting. They are lazy enough to know they can always ask staff to ‘clarify’ the occasional small item they ask about, even if they are interested, and few if any members of council have any meaningful knowledge of planning policies, they leave it all to the planner.
In fact the only municipal body able to even question a municipal planner is the Committee of Adjustment. Most members on a CoA, within their first year, know more about the municipality's planning policies than many members of council serving multiple terms.
Our planning system is totally broken, all Ford has done is to make matters even worse. The real facts are that planners, for far too many years, have been recommending development that increasingly conflicts with existing planning policies at every level, and our elected councils have been too uninformed or even too scared to oppose them.
Developers? Who can blame them entirely? They are only motivated by profit, nothing more. Why clean up the messes left in our city and urban brownfields? That eats into their profits. Far easier to destroy agricultural and rural lands. And affordable housing? You are joking? Right?
Andrew Watts
Wainfleet
