Toronto council challenged to fund staff for city planning amid development pressures

Planning and growth management committee say staff need to propose ways to fund additional staff

Thestar.com
Nov. 16, 2016
By Jennifer Pagliaro

Council is being asked to look at funding more staff to help manage unprecedented development in the city after concerns overworked city planners can’t keep up.

On Wednesday, the planning and growth management committee unanimously voted for staff to report back through the upcoming 2017 budget process on how to increase staffing.

“In no way should we not be meeting our key performance indicators,” said Councillor David Shiner, who chairs the committee and moved the motion. “Let’s hope that this is the start of making a better process.”

His motion followed the release of a union survey that reported planners are extremely overworked, which they feel is compromising their ability to plan a livable city.

“In whose interests are we planning?” CUPE Local 79 president Tim Maguire asked committee Wednesday. “Some of our members feel if it’s not fixed, it’s solely in the interests of developers . . . They’re fearful that the public interest is lost to developer interest because quick decisions get made.”

The committee also adopted increased development fees to shift the burden of paying for some planning work from taxpayers to the building industry. The changes are expected to collect an additional $12 million from development fees annually for work that would have normally been paid through the tax base.

But with Mayor John Tory requesting all budgets find 2.6 per cent in reductions for next year, chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat said they have used the additional development fees to “compensate” for those requested budget cuts.

“From my perspective this is really a political question,” Keesmaat told committee members. “Council sets the direction for us and gives us the resources to do the work that we are required to do, so we leave that to the discretion of the political administration.”

It’s unclear how council would pay for additional resources - whether development fees can be further increased or if it could come from the tax-supported operating budget.

Development fees must be used to fund the actual review of development.

The planning division, legal staff and several other city departments are involved in other important, related work to building applications, including defending council decisions at the Ontario Municipal Board, the provincial appeals body that rules on planning and land disputes.

In 2013, staff spent 4,926 hours preparing for and appearing at the OMB, Keesmaat told committee. Between January and August of this year, they have already spent 6,764 hours doing that work.

Planning staff also create neighbourhood studies and set guidelines on things like parkland and tall buildings that help direct what gets built where.

Keesmaat has acknowledged her staff are challenged to meet deadlines and perform to the best of their abilities with the current workload.

City planning’s net operating budget for 2016 was $15.3 million, which was a 1.7 per cent reduction over the previous year and saw staffing reduced by one position.

Councillors say Tory-requested budget cuts for next year leave little room for improvement.

“Basically what we’re doing with fees is we’re going to recover the costs and then claw it back from the budget of the planning department so that we can meet the 2.6 (per cent) target,” Councillor Gord Perks told committee. “That would be a disaster ... You cannot defend the city’s interests with the same budget and twice the demand.”

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose downtown Ward 27 (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) has experienced significant growth, said she’s concerned about the quality of the work.

“I see that they’re struggling to deliver the very best planning decisions and rationale for us,” she said. “You can not humanly ask more people to do more things and give them less resources to do that.”

Operating budget talks launch Dec. 2.

Council will vote on increased fees and whether to look at additional staff resources at a meeting that starts Dec. 13.