Denley: Ontario’s new rules on housing starts are a wake-up call for Ottawa city hall

New provincial rules intended to speed up housing development approvals are just the kick in the pants that people at Ottawa city hall need.

Ever since the city was amalgamated in 2001, city politicians and planning bureaucrats have been talking about “streamlining” the process that holds up new developments for months, sometimes years. Instead of fixing the slow approval process, the city squirrelled away some of the approval fees developers paid. In 2021, the city took in $2.8 million more than it spent on services in what is billed as a user-pay system.

All that’s changing and it’s about time. The provincial government is introducing a whole new concept into municipal development approvals: accountability. If planning approvals aren’t completed within new provincial timelines, the city will have to start refunding fees. Imagine, a world in which a municipal government’s failure to perform properly has actual consequences.

A comparison of the city’s performance with the provincial targets that take effect July 1 shows what a shoddy job is being done now. Site plan approvals deal with relatively minor stuff such as walkways, landscaping and the exterior appearance of buildings. The city takes an average of 196 days to make those decisions. The new standard is 60 days. Usefully, the provincial government has taken away councillors’ ability to fiddle with site plan approvals. It will be a staff decision now.

Zoning approvals involve bigger decisions such as increases in height or density. It’s common for properties to be zoned for a use that is less than allowed under the Official Plan. That means a zoning change is required.  Those changes take an average of 178 days in Ottawa. Under the new rules, the decision must be made in 90 days.

The city had its own, much more lax, targets for approvals, but failed to meet them more than two-thirds of the time in 2022.

The new provincial rules are certainly not something the city can ignore. As a city staff report notes, failure to meet targets would have “colossal impacts on revenue,” potentially forcing the city to dip into other budget areas to cover the shortfall.

For site plan applications, a 50-per-cent refund kicks in if the application is held even one day beyond the limit. If it takes 60 days longer than allowed, there is a full refund. If zoning bylaw amendments go beyond 210 days, there is a full refund with a sliding scale for lesser tardiness. Fees for a zoning bylaw amendment are up to $22,000 and for a site plan approval, they range between $20,000 and $50,000.

To meet the new deadlines, city staff say they need 37 new full-time employees at an annual cost of about $5 million. The salaries of 32 of those employees will be paid from higher fees charged to developers. The other five will be paid from the existing budget, a sign that more could have been done before now without additional cost to taxpayers or developers.

City councillors will be expected to work harder on planning files. To help meet the new deadlines, city staff are recommending that planning committee and council meet every two weeks to keep the approvals going, even during times when the city’s meeting agenda has traditionally been light.

There has been some concern about the speedier approval cutting into public consultation. It will, but public consultation will be compressed, not eliminated; if that does anything to reduce the reflexive opposition to development, all to the good.

City staff do deserve credit for preparing a comprehensive plan to meet the provincial goals, even if they would never have speeded things up on their own. However, there is nothing in the new city plan, which councillors have little choice but to approve next week, that couldn’t have been done any time in the last two decades.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and author. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com