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There is something seriously amiss with the City of Ottawa’s handling of the expansion of a golf course owned by Mayor Bob Chiarelli’s brother.
On the face of it, Riverbend Golf Course owner Frank Chiarelli looks like a scofflaw who is thumbing his nose at zoning rules. Eight—yes, eight—years ago, Chiarelli expanded his course on 23 acres that wasn’t zoned for a golf course. Only now is the city doing anything about it, and that’s because an environmentalist finally demanded a bylaw charge be laid.
Proceeding without zoning approvals is no red tape technicality. The zoning bylaw is what keeps your next-door neighbour from putting up a 20-storey building or an auto body shop. Without zoning, the city would be a free-for-all.
There is an environmental concern, too. It also appears Chiarelli ignored a Ministry of Natural Resources rule that says there must be a 30-metre buffer zone around the Jock River, to prevent fertilizer and pesticides from running into it.
Despite what seems to be a blatant disregard for the rules, the city let the situation go for years with nothing more than belated requests for Chiarelli to apply for approval of the golf course that was already built and operating.
Frank Chiarelli has a different interpretation: He says he applied to the former Goulbourn Township to get the land rezoned and submitted the necessary papers. When he heard nothing, he assumed the rezoning was approved. That seems like the kind of thing you’d want to know for sure before building a golf course.
The only reason the city is putting him through the hoops now, Chiarelli suggests, is because of “outright harassment” from the Friends of the Jock River environmental group, and because he’s the mayor’s brother.
The city actually had to lay charges against Chiarelli to get him to submit a zoning application.
The charges have been dropped because he has begun the process. Councillor Janet Stavinga, who was mayor of Goulbourn at the time the golf course was built, says it was never approved and she was “furious” when the charges were dropped. She believes Chiarelli should have to pay a penalty for the costs the city has incurred getting him to follow the rules.
The city doesn’t seem keen on a conviction, but it had better produce an outcome.
If Chiarelli hasn’t done enough to protect the river, he should be forced to fix it, even if that means rearranging his golf course.
Dropping the charges doesn’t leave Chiarelli in the clear. He must prove to city planning staff, the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority that he has protected the river.
Grant Lindsay, the city’s manager of development approvals, says he will have no problem recommending whatever it takes to make sure the river is protected. If that means moving golf holes, that’s Frank Chiarelli’s problem, Lindsay says. It’s the risk developers take when they don’t get approvals upfront.
Chiarelli isn’t too happy that city staff did nothing about the situation for four years, and now they are all over him. Ken McRae, the environmentalist who finally made the complaint, isn’t impressed with the delay, either.
Lindsay admits his department should have brought the golf course matter to a head sooner, but says he inherited a number of unresolved zoning situations from the predecessor municipalities and has been working his way through them.
There are only two ways to look at this. City staff were reluctant to pursue Riverbend because it’s owned by the mayor’s brother, or they take this kind of slack attitude toward every developer who ignores the rules. Neither alternative is impressive.
If the bureaucrats sign off, the issue will go to the city’s agriculture and rural affairs committee in September, just about the time the public starts to pay attention to the municipal election. What luck for the mayor. Frank Chiarelli says he has avoided discussing the problem with his brother, but the mayor did phone him four or five months ago “to ask what’s going on.”
This will be an interesting test for the agriculture committee. Rural planning was shifted to it because of a perception the city was imposing too much red tape on the rural areas.
The Riverbend controversy has nothing to do with red tape. It’s an issue of basic environmental protection and a businessman who didn’t do enough to make sure he’d followed the rules.
If the councillors on the agriculture committee decide to cut Chiarelli slack because his course is in a rural area, it will send a really bad message.
There is not much use having zoning rules if they aren’t enforced. If councillors don’t take a tough line on the Riverbend golf course, the lesson of this particular fiasco will be that developers can go ahead and do what they like, and their only jeopardy is that they might be compelled to follow the proper process, years later.
Contact Randall Denley at 596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006