Thank you for the…

Thank you for the opportunity to submit comments about the proposed changes to the Planning Act and Development Charges Act.
Reducing Development Charges (DCs) will reduce the costs for developers to build homes, but there is absolutely no evidence that those cost savings will be passed along to home buyers. For this reason, this change does nothing to address the lack of affordable homes in Ontario.
What the changes will accomplish is a reduction in the revenues for municipalities. Changing (restricting) the way municipalities can spend the revenue from DCs will reduce the ability of municipalities to build and maintain recreation centres and parks in communities.
The reduction in municipal revenues from DCs will result in a higher tax burden for taxpayers. Unless the province provides support, these changes will be quite harmful.
The province is imposing growth targets that give municipalities no alternative but to grow, and at the same time the province is also forcing the existing taxpayers to pay for that growth. This makes no sense.
The higher populations will be forced to use existing recreation facilities and parks, leading to crowding, and more wear and tear - higher maintenance costs.
Due to forced growth, municipalities will also be faced with the costs of maintaining the larger amounts of infrastructure required to support that growth - more roads, more water, more sewage to treat, more areas to service for public transit and so on.
I request that the proposed changes be removed.