The Province has proposed…

The Province has proposed several changes to how Official Plans are implemented in Ontario, including standardizing and simplifying contents, increasing flexibility, limiting development standards in Official Plans, and potentially removing the ability to have secondary or site-specific plans.

SDG is one of several rural counties that has an Official Plan at the upper-tier level with no or very few local Official plans and has been using this model successfully for 20 years. Having a single official plan reduces costs and staff time compared to each municipality needing its own plan in addition to the County plan. The proposed consultation does not consider counties like SDG, Renfrew, Prescott-Russell and many other rural municipalities where the upper-tier plan functions as the only Official Plan for all local municipalities, some local municipalities, or for areas outside settlement areas in local municipalities. Removing the ability for area-specific policies and secondary plans would mean that local municipalities that do not have an Official Plan would need to develop their own Official Plans in order to have policies that specifically affect their municipalities. This would introduce the need for local Official Plan amendments and add additional cost and time for developments, along with the substantial cost for these municipalities to develop and keep their Official Plans up to date.

The proposed standardized structure would also increase the number of urban designations and schedules compared to the existing SDG Official Plan and reduce the amount of rural designations. If the designations move forward as proposed, it would have the effect of adding more red-tape to planning applications with housing and less process for larger applications such as salvage yards and which have a major impact on surrounding land uses. For example, large apartment buildings would now require an Official Plan amendment, whereas currently apartment buildings are permitted in both Residential and Commercial designations and only require local municipal approval.

The proposed structure has a significant omission by not including a chapter for the "Rural Lands" or "Rural Designation" which is the predominant designation in many rural Ontario municipalities. SDG also has significant policy differences for urban (serviced) vs rural (unserviced) settlement areas. The Rural Settlement Area district is flexible and permits a variety of residential, commercial and rural industrial uses, recognizing that many rural hamlets are a blend of rural countryside and low-density residential development. The proposed structure would now require Official Plan Amendments for developments that only require zoning amendments currently.

The proposed standardized schedules would increase the amount of schedules for SDG's Official Plan and require SDG to complete additional studies to develop these schedules.

The removal of development standards in Official Plans would have a negative impact on issues like water quantity/quality and prime agricultural lands, as many municipalities include minimum lot sizes for privately serviced lots and new farm lots in order to implement the PPS and protect key resources like prime agricultural areas. In many cases these standards are implementing provincial guidelines or were added by MMAH as part of Official Plan reviews. Removing these standards will make it more difficult to defend standards in local zoning by-laws, as there will be no policy basis for these standards.

The PPS states that "The Provincial Planning Statement recognizes the diversity of Ontario and that local context is important. Policies are outcome-oriented, and some policies provide flexibility in their implementation provided that provincial interests are upheld. " This proposal has a negative impact on how local communities can plan for the diverse needs in their communities and will increase the amount of Official Plan Amendments in SDG from 1-3 per year to likely several dozen.