City to help developers clean up Ottawa brownfields

Developers will get tax breaks from the City of Ottawa to help them turn vacant contaminated properties into bustling streetscapes.

The citywill cover half the cost of cleaning up contaminated industrial sites, or brownfields, by lowering development fees andtaxes for those properties, city council decided Wednesday.

'It just is not cost-effective for us to have vacant sites sitting paying minimal taxes when [they] could be developed.' Coun. Diane Holmes

Councillors such as Diane Holmes said the Brownfields Redevelopment Strategy is badly needed to clean up long-vacant sites in her urban ward of Somerset and transform them intomore taxablereal estatesuch as highrise condominiums.

"It just is not cost-effective for us to have vacant sites sitting paying minimal taxes when [they] could be developed," she said.

Some councillors argued that the cost of the cleanup is already largely covered by the lower price that developers pay for contaminated land, but Holmes said that is not incentive enough right now.

She added that the program should be re-evaluated in a few years to see whether it is still needed.

City staff originally suggested that Ottawa pay the full cost of cleaning up contaminated properties instead of half, but that proposal was rejected by city committees and amended before going to council.