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People in the village of Richmond are on the receiving end of what is surely the most contradictory planning policy the City of Ottawa has. The city won’t expand its urban boundary on the grounds that suburban sprawl must be stopped. It’s a reasonable position, but the city contradicts it with an aggressive plan to direct growth to rural villages instead. If new development doesn’t make sense on the urban edge, why is it better 10 kilometres down the road where there is no municipal water, an inadequate sewage system and a lack of road capacity?
That’s what people in Richmond are trying to figure out as they cope with a plan by Mattamy Homes that could ultimately more than double the size of their village. While people were initially open to developing Richmond, there are now signs that it could end up like Manotick, where villagers have waged a long, bitter fight to slow development.
Mattamy and local residents are working on a plan for the community, but some village leaders say that it’s just a device to further Mattamy’s development plans. Mattamy has brought in a team of consultants to create “a pie-in-the-sky vision of what Richmond could be like, while acting as a smokescreen to distract us from the real issue, which is the proposed doubling in size of our village,” says Elaine Morgan, who is vice-chair of the committee working on the community plan. If Mattamy’s development goes ahead, “We’re going to become another Barrhaven, another Stittsville,” Morgan says.
Bruce Webster, head of the Richmond Village Association, is concerned that greater density in the Mattamy development will change the character of the village. It’s urban development outside the urban area, he says.
Although Mattamy purchased or took options on more than 300 acres 18 months ago, basic questions about servicing the development remain unanswered, Webster says.
One can certainly see why people in Richmond would be alarmed. The community plan that’s meant to set the tone for the village’s development is being paid for by Mattamy. Councillor Glenn Brooks promised the plan during the last election, but subsequently discovered that the city couldn’t afford the $750,000 project. Even for a developer with the best of intentions, that sounds like putting the fox in charge of henhouse security.
The city anticipates that about nine per cent of its growth over the next 20 years will go to rural areas and most of that will be directed to villages. City planners say the growth will make the villages more “sustainable,” by adding enough new bodies to allow retail expansion, keep up the numbers of students in schools and justify additional city services.
In other words, the city is determined to make villages larger for their own good, even though they are communities that many chose to move to because of their small size.
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