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Environmentally sound building projects should receive extra-swift treatment from the city’s planning department, Mayor Jim Watson told city councillors in unveiling his proposed budget for 2012.
“Starting next year we will provide a ‘green express lane’ for developments that strive for more,” Watson said. “We will set a tough standard for housing, buildings and renovations to qualify for the green express lane.”
The goal is to identify and publicize better building techniques the city wants to favour – solar hotwater heaters, for instance, or systems that use rainwater for bathrooms – and reward builders who want to use them by having them treated by a completely separate team in the city’s planning and building departments.
“Projects will qualify based on planned energy and water efficiency, construction waste minimization, and overall environmental footprint,” a city description of the plan says, although there are no specific funds attached to it.
The idea is a response to two frequent criticisms of the city: that planning approvals take too long (though the budget notes with some pride that the number of building permits issued within the legal time limit has gone from 65 per cent five years ago to over 90 per cent); and that city building officials are stymied by new techniques and technology for which they don’t already have playbooks.
Indeed, for four years ending in 2007, the city simply refused to issue permits for solar hot-water heaters because there wasn’t a national standard for them. That changed when the Ontario Building Code was finally updated to include the long-used technology.
After the budget presentation, Watson also said he hoped to set “benchmarks” in 2012 for how long each phase of a planning approval should take and eventually promise discounts when the city didn’t meet those targets.
“Each transaction would have to be different because obviously a site plan for a subdivision is substantially different than putting a veranda on your backyard, so we’d have to judge it accordingly to the scope and magnitude of the project,” Watson said.
The head of the city’s planning department, John Moser, immediately began lowering the boom on his staff in a mid-afternoon memo obtained by the Citizen. “I am sympathetic to the nature of our profession – of the regulatory role that we play, of the myriad of legislation and interests that we balance every day,” he wrote. “But there has never been a greater time to improve our operations than now. We will all be under an increased microscope in 2012 and we must deliver or face collective consequences.”
The other explicitly pro-environment measure in the budget is $1.4 million for the city’s fund for buying environmentally sensitive land. Watson also promised to pursue money from the federal and provincial budgets to upgrade the city’s sewers so they vented less sewage into the Ottawa River during heavy rains and to work harder to enforce zoning and community design plans despite some builders’ requests to erect bigger buildings than the rules allow.
“We are going to make infill work,” said Watson, who also complained about the costs of fights over enforcing the rules. “This council will be asking more of builders. Developers will be expected to pay for the full cost of the growth in infrastructure they cause.”
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
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