Ottawa might have to sprawl by another 163 hectares after it emerged Wednesday that the citys lawyers didnt understand an Ontario Municipal Board ruling the same way as the OMB member who made it.
The Ontario Municipal Board can overrule city planning decisions and regularly hears appeals of city decisions about its urban boundary.
The most recent major ruling on Ottawas boundary, where houses give way to countryside, ordered the city to open 850 hectares of countryside to development. The question is whether 163 hectares of land between Kanata and Stittsville are part of what the city was planning to allow to be developed anyway.
The citys lawyers think so, but OMB member Norman Jackson thinks not. The difference is the equivalent of 10 Lansdowne Parks.
It came up Wednesday because Jackson and fellow OMB member Aristotle Christou, the same panel who made the ruling on the 850 hectares, are overseeing a weeks-long hearing on exactly which land ought to be developed. The citys planning department proposes particular parcels of property in north Kanata, Barrhaven, OrlĂans and south Gloucester, but is contending with appeals from landowners who say their property would be better than the land the city has chosen.
In the course of the hearing, Jackson quoted from his previous order, which dispensed with the land between Kanata and Stittsville before going on to deal with the bigger question of the 850 hectares. The 23-page decision is intricate and could be read to support either interpretation, particularly since it doesnt include a clear summary explaining exactly what Jackson and Christou intended.
However, its their ruling and they presumably know what they meant.
The revelation sent the citys top planning lawyer, Tim Marc, bursting into the city council chamber Wednesday morning, yelling to summon senior officials – including the mayors chief of staff Serge Arpin, planning committee chair Peter Hume and vice-chair Jan Harder, planning department chief John Moser, deputy city manager Nancy Schepers and city solicitor Rick OConnor – for a huddle in the corner. At first, none of them would say what was going on.
Back in the hearing, taking place in a City Hall meeting room and featuring a platoon of dark-suited lawyers questioning planners about the wisdom of the citys land choices, business carried on.
Lawyer and lobbyist Richard Mahoney, who works for property developers Walton Group, said during a break that eyes widened and jaws dropped around the room when Jackson asked whether the city was doublecounting the land near Fernbank Road.
Hume explained the problem in a memo to fellow councillors a short time later.
The City and all other parties have been operating under the belief that the 850 hectares included the Fernbank lands and therefore what was really to be added to the urban area was approximately 687 hectares, wrote Hume, who went on to explain the importance of the later planning decision (OPA 77) that opened the land between Kanata and Stittsville to development.