The City of Ottawa released the first draft of its new Official Plan on November 20, 2020. After years of high level discussion papers, strategic policy directions, deferred growth management decisions, we would finally see what the City concretely intended to put in the new Official Plan. It wasn’t easy to discern however as the…
Ottawa City Hall
In a session that lasted less than two hours, the City presented two settlements that had been reached with various appellants: One party’s appeal of OPA 180 and a large number of OPA 150 appeals by the Greater Ottawa Homebuilders Association (GOHBA) and the Building Owners and Management Association (BOMA). The settlements had previously been…
The Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT, formerly OMB) held another pre-hearing conference last Friday morning. Its main outcome is that the dates are set for hearings of the various appeals of OPA 150/140/179/180, the cluster of Comprehensive Official Plan review amendments: Appeals on Mineral Aggregates matters, which are expected to take only two days, will…
January 3 was booked as the first of three days for an Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) Pre-Hearing Conference to consider a raft of appeals on a long list of matters, but it was all over by 1 p.m. So while everything hummed along smoothly, the last hour produced a nasty surprise. At issue were the…
Pre-hearing conference of January 3, 2018 Pre-hearing conference of May 4, 2018 The consolidated text of the Official Plan, as of October 2018 (PDF – 15 MB), annotated Pre-hearing conference of October 22, 2018 Pre-hearing conference of May 22, 2019 (includes Building Heights and Design settlement) Hearings (and links to the respective Procedural Order) + Mineral…
Last December 13, students in Queen’s University Urban Planning Program presented the result of a project, Canada’s Resilient Capital: Ottawa in the Next Half Century. The project was devised and executed in cooperation with the City, under the supervision of David Gordon. (The clients are identified as John Smit and Alain Miguelez.) Their Report (181…
In preparation for the next revision of the Official Plan, the City has launched the Beyond 20136 Sounding Board. Around 50 representatives from a wide spectrum of organization and interests, public, private and from civil society have been invited by the City to advise it on how to frame and position the next revision of…
The Greenspace Alliance was invited to sit as a member of the Sounding Board for the City planning exercise Beyond 2036. The goal of this planning project was to set the scene and context for the next review of the Official Plan. Through its participation at meetings and workshops organized by city planners over several…
The Greenspace Alliance has submitted its input to the City of Ottawa regarding the 2018 Budget. It called on the City to adequately fund the recently approved Urban Forest Management Plan (UFMP), to replenish the capital reserve used to acquire greenspace for preservation purposes and to invest in developing the geographic data required to evaluate…
“Site alteration” generally refers to the placing or dumping of fill, the removal of topsoil, changing the grade of land, or the removal of vegetation. Section 142 of the Municipal Act allows municipalities to adopt a site alteration by-law. Many municipalities have done so. As early as 2011, Paul Renaud put together a table of…