HRM's plan for development goes before council today
The Halifax Herald Limited
Thursday, March 11, 2004
By AMY PUGSLEY FRASER / City Hall Reporter
Halifax Regional Municipality's plan to handle unserviced residential development over the next 18 months will be taken to council at a special meeting this afternoon.
Councillors will hold first reading of the interim growth management plan amendments drafted over the past few weeks by a core group of staff from the municipality's regional planning department.
"I think it's quite favourable," regional planning project manager Carol Macomber said Wednesday.
"There are opportunities for a range of people."
A staff report says the proposed amendments are needed to allow HRM's 25-year regional plan to proceed - and to replace a 90-day provincial development moratorium order that expires on April 20.
"It maintains the overall intention of preventing the accelerated unserviced development - preventing sprawl," Ms. Macomber said.
The amendments - which would affect HRM's individual municipal planning strategies as well as land-use and subdivision bylaws - would be in place for 18 months while the regional plan is worked out.
In the 263-page report distributed to councillors in advance of the meeting, staff recommend adopting the proposed regulations over the next 18 months to provide for:
- 25 lots per year for subdivision concept plans received before last Jan. 22
- HRM to have the authority to require hydrogeological assessments during the development application process
- infilling along existing streets and roads
- grandfathering any completed tentative or final subdivision applications submitted before Jan. 22 and any area covered by a development agreement approved by council
- continuing growth management regulations that pre-date the ministerial order.
The regulations are important, the staff report says, because "past experience in HRM has demonstrated that developers will undertake accelerated development approvals in order to avoid anticipated growth management regulations, significantly undermining the original intent of the plan."
The CEO of the Nova Scotia Homebuilders Association says he's seen the report and is in favour of most of its recommendations.
"It's a step in the right direction," Paul Pettipas said Wednesday.
His industry came up with a 25-lot proposal at one of three February public meetings on growth controls.
"We suggested something and they suggested back," he said.
"What they're saying is 25 lots per year, but on a concept plan that was in the system before Jan. 22."
Mr. Pettipas said he'd like to see "a bit of fairness" for someone who had the work done and wasn't in the system before the ministerial order came down.
"If they can prove they were actively working toward a concept plan . . . we're hoping that there can be a bit of flexibility there," he said.
HRM staff tried to come up with a way to make that variation of the 25-lot plan manageable within the goals of interim growth management, Ms. Macomber said.
"And we couldn't quantify the number of lots that would be created, potentially thousands and thousands of lots and roads," she said. "The whole purpose of doing it would have been lost."
Instead, HRM proposed the clause that allows up to 25 lots per year, provided there is a concept plan in place, because it still provided for some flexibility but also kept the overall goals intact.
"It's quantified, it's known, and there is some investment on the part of the property owner," Ms. Macomber said.
The Nova Scotia Homebuilders Association also favours hydrogeological testing to determine water tables in a subdivision before development.
"That was done before, that's not a problem," Mr. Pettipas said.
Members of the homebuilders association plan to be at this afternoon's meeting - but not in an adversarial context, he said.
"We were mad before ... but now we're in the position to say, 'Let's sit down, we're both in this together, to work it out.'"
The next step is to move the amendments into the public forum over the next few months. A public hearing is tentatively scheduled for March 30.