Consolidating and…

Consolidating and harmonizing the existing 36 individual conservation authority-approved regulations into 1 Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry approved regulation will help to ensure consistency and must be done as soon as possible.

Conversation Ontario needs to be the lead in amalgamating all of the Section 28 regs. Currently this is done at the CA level which leads to discrepancies and some CA's do not even have policies in place. Having individual CA's do their own regulations is simply not right because the setbacks can be changed per staff or board members to suit their views. I do not believe that it is any one's best interest to allow CA's to have a local flexibility. Water hazards are uniform. Larger CA's have more money and resources to commission studies to potentially reduce setbacks while smaller ones simply cannot afford to do that. In many pro-development communities such as LSRCA the ability to develop is much easier than an anti-development board.

All of these policies need to be publicly posted for the public. This needs to be a very transparent and an open review for the public that is well advertised.

All permit fee's need to be uniform across the board and set by Conversation Ontario. The current fee's revolves around costs generated for the planning department's and some fee's could be exorbitant due to mismanagement of staff expenses. By allowing CA's to set their own fee's, the costs can be used to make development very expensive.

Minor applications such as pools and decks need to be reviewed. These types of minor applications should be exempt from fee's as very little time is spent on them and they just become a source of revenue and another restriction to development.

Regulatory setbacks need to be reviewed because in many cases 30m and 120m are way too much. Some of these setbacks go over paved roads and restrict neighbouring property owners when they should not. In most cases these setback restrictions are not conveyed to the affect property owner because they do not fall within the actual hazard.

The rezoning of private property needs to be revamped completely. In a recent PSW review, an aerial map is being used but the OWES manual is the one that has the rating system in it. In my view PSW's under a certain size do not and should not qualify. Many good stewards of land (PSW's) are being punished while other municipalities that have drained their wetlands have very few restrictions. Onus should be on MNRF & CO to provide funding to create habitat in communities where there are very little wetlands left. By punishing the good stewards you are losing the battle as certain ones will take steps to protecting their properties by draining their wetlands.

Funding needs to be provided to wetland projects to stop run off of fertilizers into cold water streams instead of blaming the farming community. More regulations do not solve the source problem.

The regulations dealing with safe access / egress needs to be reviewed. In many cases historical communities have been build without this in mind and if the rules were to be followed all development would be halted and these communities would fail to exist in time.

The Province of Ontario has a funding problem with infrastructure and much of this could be resolved using the original mandate of the CA's. Since the CA's are the experts in dealing with water based hazards, they should be the ones undertaking reviews of dam's for municipalities with funding measures put in place. If they are not the experts and municipal staff must hire outside should it not be considered to remove the CA's planning process completely and pass that down to the municipalities to remove another layer of red tape?

Conservation Ontario should be the driving force when it comes to service delivery standards. There should be quarterly reports made publicly available about each and every CA's development applications. Many applications are tied up at the staff level that the board never see.

Of all of the government agencies that hold meetings, only Conservation Ontario agenda's are password protected so that the public has no access to the information being discussed. In this day where governments are promoting their transparency, open data and accountability, I find it offensive that Conservation Ontario holds all of their meetings in closed session hidden from public view.