From the Gooderham & Worts…

From the Gooderham & Worts Neighbourhood Association
To the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and Premier Ford
The GWNA represents the interests of residents of the Distillery District. Its development committee is responsible for making sure our neighbours' local knowledge and concerns are fully taken into account by developers and planners, most often during the site plan application process.
As minister, I am sure you are aware how valuable local insights are in achieving optimal planning solutions. If the province gives itself the authority to overrule the usual site plan application process, every municipality in the province will suffer from ill-informed and undemocratically made decisions. We are surprised that your government would wish to centralise this process into an authority far from community grass-roots.
We urge you, as we are sure do all communities in Ontario, not to remove municipal use of site plan control and impose agreements with developers and landowners.
Secondly, we urge you to go further and strictly limit the use of Ministerial Zoning Orders. In recent months these have been used against the better advice of residents, planners, land use specialists and environmentalists. Plans to increase the use of these instruments and the modifications to them in Bill 197 were not made public in any statement before the last provincial election nor during the campaign. Concerned communities were given no opportunity to consider and discuss these provisions nor to advise you on their possible consequences.
For the sake of a better informed and more democratic planning process in Ontario, we urge you to refrain from implementing the provisions in the planning act which represent a transfer of authority from communities to a centralised authority.