Why you should care about today's official plan vote

If you haven't gone through the maps in the City of Ottawa's draft new official plan, looking at areas shaded in purple and roads in thick and thin lines, perhaps you should.

They'll give you a glimpse ofareas expected to be redeveloped in thefuture, so you'll beless surprised whenseveralmulti-storeybuildings you never imagined in your neighbourhood getbuilding permits.

The official planbeing voted onattoday's city council meeting will set out how Ottawa grows for the next 25 years. It's not an update this city-building document hasbeenwritten from scratch for the first time in a generation, and it aims to aggressively build up existing areas, especially those closer to downtown, to keep from spreading farther out.

More than two years of intense staff work andcommittee debate have led us here. The city set an overarchinggoal: to make Ottawa the most livable mid-sizecity in North America by creating neighbourhoods where residents are a 15-minute walk from groceries, schoolsand transit.

• Official plan approved by committees after dozens of amendments
• How walkable is your Ottawa neighbourhood? This new map will tell you

The plan has been tweaked a couple of times, including through dozens of motionsat committee last week. More changes could be made atcouncil.

Some dedicated residents havefollowedevery twist and turn ofthese past two years and offered their own detailed suggestions.

Angela Keller-Herzog, a member of what she called a "loose-knit alliance" of groupsknown as the People's Official Plan, summed up their feelings this week. After all this time and work, she said the City of Ottawa's new official plan "falls short of meeting its own ambition"and their expectations.

Fears offast change and lost trees

Much comes down to intensification building more units in acompact space and how to do it.

Environmentally minded residents support compact living. They want fewer people driving, and would like to endurban sprawl altogether. Their ideal would seesmaller-scale buildings where families can live in a largeapartment and people can grow old in their neighbourhoods.

But what's found in the maps and documents about Ottawa'sfuture has scared them.

Residents from the City View neighbourhood west of MerivaleRoad, for instance, spoke up during thethree-day committee meeting, which ran nearly30 hours and heard from 96 well-informed public delegations.

• Official plan's vagueness could spur unchecked development, residents argue

They seedots on the map for bus rapid transit stations all along Baseline Road, where nothing like thatcurrently exists. The area is slated for taller buildings, but residents say that shouldn't come before transit upgrades have a construction date.

Such development along corridors could leave Ottawa looking more like a city of"urban canyons" instead of"urban villages,"said Paul Johanis, a member of the Greenspace Alliance of Canada's Capital who has closely watched the official plan unfold.

And with all this construction, possibly the biggest concern for many residents is losing trees.

The city has set a target of40 per centtree canopy citywide, but that doesn't ensure a neighbourhood hasshade, they say. Only last week didcommunity advocates get traction forsub-targets for tree canopy something to be dealt with over the next two years.

Future conflicts

City staff saychange willbegradual and incremental, but many delegations have doubts.Theypointed tolanguage in the new official plan they expect developers could exploit.

The Greater Ottawa Home Builders' Association, on the other hand, findsthe official plan lacking for a different reason. It argues the city has set itsintensification sights too high, and won't have enough housing supply for the growing population.

That could harm home buyers, some said, andcity policies could drive house prices even further out of reach.

At committee, Claridge Homes executive Neil Malhotra predicted conflicts among communities and developers will continue. He suggested how to avoid them: giveeach area an intensification target and let them figure outhow to absorb new residents.

The People's Official Plan members agree. Planning needs to happen at the neighbourhood level, they say, and every areaneeds to take on population, not just older areas already under pressurelike Westboro.

"We cannot plan at 30,000 feet and expect communities and developers not to end up in conflict," said Carolyn Mackenzie, a planner and member of the Glebe Community Association.

"We can't leave all this loose languagein the official plan and expect us not to end up in an ongoingconflict."

Tewinrisks

Given all the focus on intensification as the counterbalance to expanding suburbia,the future Tewincommunity"sticks out like a sore thumb,"as one public delegation put it this month.

Today's vote couldcement acontroversial decision from last winter, when council expanded the urban boundary toinclude 445 hectares in the rural southeast in the name of reconciliation and economic development forthe Algonquins of Ontario (AOO).

You'll find Tewin on yet another map, shown in orange on lands mostly owned by the AOOand its developer partner TaggartGroup. Their vision is to create a new sustainablecommunity for thousands of people based on "Algonquin place making."

• Algonquins of Ontario face questions about private venture
• Algonquins of Ontario not the biggest landowner at Tewin
• Tewin community has been mapped, and affected residents are skeptical

Many Algonquin leaders stillstrongly object to the AOOand their plans, however. Savanna McGregor, the acting grand chief of theAlgonquin Anishinabe Nation Tribal Council,wrote the mayor and all councillors yesterday, telling them to take Tewin off the table.

She said they had not been properly consulted, and Tewin"could be a very costly mistake on many fronts."

A new suburb will require water, sewers, roads, transit, community centres and garbage collection, far from existing infrastructure.

City staff have begun writinga memorandum of understanding soTaggart and the AOO pay for certain infrastructure, but the People's Official Plan wantsan independent analysis of the liability the city could face and say council can't just turn the negotiation over to staff today ifinfrastructure could end up costingbillions of dollars.

"This one risk stands out above all the others," said Keller-Herzog.

Councillors Riley Brockington and Rawlson King agree there is simply too little information of both the costs and the climate change impacts of growing that direction, and plan to table a motion to do as the Algonquin chiefs have asked and remove Tewin. They would re-insert lands in South March for future expansion.

It's been a long road already, and today won't be the end of it. The provincial minister for municipalities, Steve Clark, has to give the final OKon the new official plan.

Then comes a giant, detailed zoning exercise, and councillors already plan to turn to it tomorrow.