Ottawa City staff is engaged in a review of its Guidelines to development applicants for submitting an Environmental Impact Statement. An EIS is required as specified in section 4.7.8 of the Official Plan. City Council mandated this review when it adopted the first edition of the Guidelines in July 2010.

The draft 2nd edition is here (656 KB).

The Greenspace Alliance’s comments are here.

While generally supportive of the Guidelines, the comments offer seven areas where they could be strengthened. In addition, the comment points out that, in Ottawa, environmental impacts are defined as solely referring to impacts on designated natural areas or other natural heritage features. This does not exhaust the kind of environmental impacts that development proposals may have.

Attached to the comment is a 2005 report on how the Region of Waterloo performs development reviews.

Erwin

31 March 2012