I am a Municipal Land Use…

I am a Municipal Land Use Planner who returned to work after an extended leave to raise my children. I have been practicing since the year 2000.

In the last three years, there have been a significant amount of ongoing changes to planning legislation making it difficult for planners to learn and implement changes.

As a planner in a small Township I am the only planner responsible for everything from general inquiries, to development review, to policy changes. I need to know all aspects of planning such as urban design, cultural heritage, environmental planning, transportation planning, aggregates, agriculture, and more recently were supposed to be experts in climate change. How much can anyone planner be expected to know? It's too much. It is a lot to know and with more and more technical documents and changing policies it is impossible to keep up. Why aren't their templates and more concrete laws like the building code that everyone must meet. When the building code is updated, there is no need to update other documents such as an official plan or zoning by-law in a municipality, this is very time consuming for planners. If you want to address climate change have specific policies, e.g. 10% of a site must be vegetated, update the building code. For second units, they should be allowed in all municipalities, rather than having each municipality go through a public process to update their official plans and zoning by-laws.

I am concerned about the proposed mapping changes for the Agricultural and Natural Heritage System. Prior to the 2017 Growth Plan, we had quite a bit of rural lands. In Feb. 2018 these lands changed to prime agriculture. If the proposed changes are implemented they will go back to rural. Once the Official Plan is updated they will be prime agriculture. This is four mapping changes. I cannot process applications to create new lots, as I don't know what the designation will be once they get to Council. And if we get a new government this could all change again. Consistency is needed. Keep the mapping as the Province's mapping.

I do not support allowing 40 hectares of land added to a settlement area. Municipal Planners need to focus on updating policy instead of being inundated with ad-hoc development requests. The policy is not clear. Is 40 hectares allowed per each settlement area, per each lower tier municipality, or across an entire upper-tier jurisdiction? If it is allowed, it should require municipal approval which cannot be appealed to LPAT.

I also do not support the rounding out of rural settlement areas. Again, this could be very time consuming for small municipalities. We need a comprehensive approach at municipal review time. Again this policy is vague. What is meant by minor rounding out? Is there a limit in hectares? And can a municipality round out all of our rural settlement areas. I believe our Township has over 20, this is potentially a lot of rounding out.

While housing affordability needs to be addressed, this is not the solution. There is a significant amount of vacant, unleased, and under utilized land that should be required to be developed before any expansions of settlement areas occur. I would like to see a target of 100% of redevelopment in the built up area until such time that all greyfields and brownfields are redeveloped. The province needs to focus on incentive programs to get these lands redeveloped.

If you want planners to implement the policy keep it simple, and please stop changing it every few months. Templates and items required automatically be-law would be good. I feel like every municipality has to invent the well. I didn't realized how complex planning was until I returned from an extended leave. The building permit is so much simpler.