Have your say on Downtown Development
As the city is in the middle of an Official Plan Review, it provides us with an opportunity to bring together residents, city staff, and developers that own major parcels of land downtown to collaborate with the goal of reaching a shared vision for future development in the downtown. If we can achieve this consensus, we have an opportunity during the Official Plan review to make holistic changes to the plan, if we think the plan should be changed. This would help to avoid site-specific amendments in between the five year review periods, and ideally bring more certainty to both developers and residents about how the downtown can and should be developed. Developments that conform to existing Official Plan and Zoning provisions can be processed more quickly, and we’d achieve greater planning peace, with developers and residents collaborating together, rather than at odds. I will be working with city planning staff, residents associations and the development community to undertake some community consultations with residents to talk about what our downtown should look like over the next 5 years. Stay tuned for more information.
