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Ottawa’s planning committee agreed yesterday to hire an independent consultant for up to $250,000 to redo a controversial study that permitted development on land along the Carp River that could be prone to flooding.
If council agrees to the recommendation, an engineering firm that is not based in Ottawa and has not done any work for developers engaged in the Kanata West development will be hired to re-examine the whole issue and report back to the city.
Several councillors warned staff to make sure that the cost of the new study, which is pegged at between $150,000 and $250,000, is not borne by the city.
The controversy erupted earlier this year when a city employee discovered that computer models of floodplain development, done for the 1,700-acre Kanata West project by a consultant hired by the developers, was riddled with mistakes. It failed to account for the extra run-off into the Carp River from surfaces that would be paved by the development, meaning the river could run higher than the models predicted.
After an investigation, the city auditor general ordered the Ottawa consulting firm that did the study—Totten Sims Hubicki—to do it again. Yesterday, the firm acknowledged mistakes and said it had redone the modelling to fix the problem. Based on the new results, the firm is recommending more changes than originally called for to the shape and flow of the Carp River: three additional habitat pools, the expansion of another pool and an increase in storage capacity. Those changes should resolve all the problems, the new report found.
The group representing 17 developers involved in Kanata West opposed hiring another consultant to do the work again, saying the corrections made by their consultant should be enough.
But city staff said the development had raised such complex and important issues that that only an independent review will lay the controversy to rest.
The review would take three to four months and be expensive, but the planning committee said too much is at stake to let time and money stand in the way. In the meantime development on the 70-acre floodplain has been frozen until the issue is resolved. But work on lands not affected by the Carp River floodplain modelling continues.