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Controversial 725-hectare project includes floodplain lands
City council’s planning committee voted to go ahead with a $300,000 review of the huge, controversial Kanata West development yesterday after a marathon meeting.
The 725-hectare Kanata West project has become a giant planning headache for the city because of questions about whether it should allow building on 28 hectares of floodplain, major provincial delays in development approvals, errors in modelling for potential flooding and concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
The city responded to the problems with the promise of an independent review of the development, but that didn’t get an easy ride at planning committee, as some councillors said the review didn’t go far enough and others said the whole process had gotten out of hand, with much too wide a scope.
What’s clear is that the development is a regulatory quagmire for the city, with provincial ministries giving the city differing advice about what to do.
While the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Natural Resources seem content with what the city and the Kanata West developers are doing, the Ministry of the Environment sent the city a letter with highly specific things it wants to see done in the review.
The city’s manager for the project, Rob Mackay, wanted to keep the review focused on technical information that will ensure the quantities and flow levels from the Carp River are correctly accounted for, and that the city has reliable information about the restoration of the river.
The Carp is a small river than has been degraded over the years and is clogged with sediment.
While its flow is more like a stream much of the year, it is bordered by a lot of flat land that can flood in springtime.
The two City of Ottawa engineers who are warning about the flood dangers in Kanata West told councillors that the review proposed by senior city staff didn’t go far enough.
Darlene Conway and Ted Cooper told the committee the review needs to address wider questions, such as why development is being permitted on the flood plain in the first place.
“Let’s face it. This is a controversial project with a lot of unknowns,” said Mr. Cooper, cautioning councillors that the city and its residents will pay the price for flawed decisions that allow development in flood-prone lands and saying Kanata has a history of flooding. “It’s risky.”
Mr. Cooper worked on the Kanata West project as a staff engineer with the city, but was removed after he continually objected to the development due to potential flood concerns.
“We don’t know where the existing flood plain is. We need to understand better what the risks are,” said Ms. Conway.
At the end of several hours of discussion, councillors agreed to the review, with some additional scope given to explore the issue of whether the city’s flood plain policy—recognizing flood plain as well as “flood fringe”—is sound public policy.
Councillors Jan Harder and Gord Hunter didn’t want the city to spend anything on the review, saying the Ministry of the Environment should do the study work and make the decisions. Ms. Harder said the whole issue had become an overblown witch-hunt that unfairly calls into question the abilities of the city’s planning staff and some of its best developers.
Councillors Clive Doucet and Diane Holmes said the project has been developer-driven, but it will be city taxpayers who pay the remediation bills if neighbourhoods are built that flood in the future.
They argued that in an era of increasingly stormy weather, it’s foolish to allow building near any river.
Ms. Holmes said that the fact that the Ministry of the Environment gave the city detailed instructions about what to do shows that the provincial government doesn’t trust Ottawa to manage such important issues.
The three councillors for Kanata—Shad Qadri, Marianne Wilkinson and Peggy Feltmate—said the cloud hanging over Kanata West is unfair to the people who have already moved there. They said there are residents living kilometres away from the Carp River who are wondering whether they are under threat of flooding in spring.
The committee’s approval for the review goes directly to city council today for a quick vote. Five consulting firms have been qualified to bid on the contract and it’s expected the work will be done by December.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008