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The City of Ottawa is considering subsidizing the cleanup of contaminated properties as a way to get abandoned land redeveloped.
The list of Ottawa’s brownfield properties, land that was typically contaminated by old industries, includes places such as Algonquin College’s Rideau campus on Lees Avenue, vacant since 2002; the City Centre lands and 100 Landry St. in Vanier. Brownfield properties in Ottawa also include old gas stations where tanks have rusted out, and some former industrial properties in Westboro.
While Ottawa doesn’t have nearly the number of brownfield properties as Toronto, it does have a development policy encouraging building in the core of the city.
Mike Patton, the director of communications for Mayor Larry O’Brien, said getting old, contaminated properties clean-ed up and built upon will generate more taxes for the city. He added that with city policies limiting growth of the suburban urban boundary, development is going to bump into these contaminated properties regardless.
“Sooner or later you’re going to deal with it,” said Mr. Patton.
A report on brownfield development will go to the city’s planning and environment committee on Jan. 23, then go to the corporate services committee to deal with the money involved before going to council.
It’s not clear how much cleaning up the brownfields might cost.
The tools the city could use to encourage cleanup and building on these properties include helping pay for soil testing and soil remediation, giving owners a break on their property taxes and waiving development charges.
Mr. Patton said it’s possible that with John Baird—the MP for Ottawa West-Nepean—given the job of advancing the federal government’s environmental agenda, there might be financial help from the federal government.
The federal government has recently gone through its own brownfield project in Ottawa, with the cleanup of LeBreton Flats, the industrial and residential community west of downtown Ottawa that was bulldozed in the 1960s.
Cleaning up that land, which was polluted by a great fire in 1900, and many old polluting industrial plants, cost the federal government something approaching $50 million and involved 700,000 tonnes of soil. The Flats is now the site of the new Canadian War Museum and will soon see a new residential building project.
Councillor Alex Cullen said he’s sympathetic to the idea of getting brownfield sites redeveloped, but he’s uneasy with government always being left to pick up the tab after polluting industries are long gone.
He said one option might be for the city to supply public subsidies to get land cleaned up and building under way, but then the building owner would have to pay at least some of the money back, over a certain number of years.
“We do want to promote this, but would redevelopment happen anyway?” said Mr. Cullen.
“Might we want to share the economic gain?”
Other communities in Eastern Ontario that are trying to redevelop brownfield lands are Kingston and Cornwall, which both have huge areas in which old industries left big pollution headaches.
In Cornwall, the Domtar plant left a waterfront site of 50 hectares in the central area of the city. When the plant closed last spring, the mayor of Cornwall said he couldn’t even guess at how many millions of dollars it would take to clean up 120 years of industrial production.