Last night at Notre Dame High School Mr. Tim Marc, senior legal Counsel with the City, gave a presentation to the some 100 in the audience with a draft of the report that may or may not come forth to Planning and Environment Committee on November 16th. For this report to be heard at PEC, a member of the committee will have to move it be received and that motion will also have to be seconded. As the Section 37 motion was approved unanimously by PEC on September 28th we hope this will not be an issue. We have not yet received a copy of the presentation but as soon as we do it will be posted here on the WCA blog.
In the meantime we are providing links to the CBC story about the meeting.
Edited to add:
Did you attend? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
We strongly encourage all concerned residents to attend the Planning and Environment Committee on Nov. 16 to make your arguments to council.
Hello Westboro 
The letter below is an email that I sent to Tim Marc, Senior Legal Counsel in response to Section 37.
Hello,
I attended last night’s presentation on Section 37 for the development of the Sisters of the Visitation property. I was not able to provide a verbal response to the proposal that the City and Community Groups had worked out. Nor did I provide any suggestions on what I thought would be an appropriate compensation for the density and height of the development. Therefore, I am doing so in writing.
I would like to note my opposition to what the City and Community Groups have proposed. I don’t see the value in focusing solely on allowing the community to have access to the Sisters of the Visitation property. We didn’t have it before because it was a cloistered facility and I am not expecting it now. The impact of this development extends beyond this property. For instance, the height of the building will affect the skyline for the surrounding residences (view and access to sun). Some residents will lose the privacy that they once had because of the height of the building. It will create issues with wind year round. The residents of the building will increase traffic to the area. So my proposal below would ensure that the impact of the development is tempered by the making the developer contribute to the quality of the community.
I think that some kind of formula should be developed that quantifies density, height and the issue of time that the community has to live with such a development. The City could say that every unit over the allowable density would represent a certain value. The same could be applied to height. Every story over the allowable limit would represent a certain value. And time could be a fixed number that for which the community could be expected to be compensated for the impact of the development, e.g. 25, 30, 35, etc. years. This would also have a value. Taken together these are then used to determine a dollar value.
Density X height X time = N = $
This dollar value is then the amount that the developer should be asked to provide the City as compensation for the height and density of the development. The City will then use this money to make improvements and additions to the surrounding community. This could be used for sidewalks where none exist in the neighbourhood, benches and plants for the streets, traffic calming measures, improvements to parks and community centres in the neighbourhood, etc.
I believe that this is a more objective and practical way to approach Section 37.
We dropped off our comments to T. Marc after lunch today since we didn’t find time to comment when we attended the mtg last night. Our thoughts are about the same as those presented by our Kitchissippi neighbours last night…and we feel glad for the extra month we’ve had to digest the situation. We also feel backed into a corner, almost forced to come up with goodies we’d like in compensation for this outrageous development…but none come to mind in comparison to the development’s negtive points.
I sadly recall all the effort to put together a sane Secondary Plan, just to see it violated. The framework we’ve got to work with is far beyond reasonable. Ten stories? No number of park benches, can compensate for the density that we are faced with in our neighbourhood. Living just off Byron to the east of Island Park for just about 30 years, we see daily the dangerous and unhealthy increases in traffic around the tramway. Traffic is our big issue, but if I lived closer to the high buildings that are going to continue to fill the ward, then I would be very unhappy with our plight. Some councillors I believe, now know that intensification parameters were not well defined. This is the crux. As one woman said so well last night at the mtg, we should expect that safety and security and quality of life issues in our ward are treated with the same weight as intensification and this is even written in a document she said, about intensification (I think I have that more or less right). We must demand this common sense.
Since Ashcroft has totally rejected an attempt to make this a win/win for all parties it was not surprising to hear from the majority of people at the meeting that they wanted their ‘no comment’ recorded by Mr. Marc. I appreciate that the people charged with this task came up with something that might have given the community 10,000 sq ft of space which is somewhat equivalent to a neighbourhood community centre but Ashcroft doesn’t appear to be that kind of neighbour. To add insult to injury they have an add in today’s (Nov 6th) Citizen advertising their proposed development. Somewhat liking putting the cart before the horse. If you can’t make it to the Planning and Environment Committee meeting on Nov 16th., please get your comments into the Committee co-ordinator Caitlin.Salter-MacDonald@ottawa.ca.
[…] Marc’s presentation 8 11 2010 … this is an update to this past post about a recent meeting about the […]