Growth plan targets optimistic - Flexibility wanted

NRU
Sept. 9, 2015
By Edward LaRusic

Employment targets in the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe are being called too optimistic. Ontario’s regional planning commissioners recommend the province offer municipalities some flexibility in deciding how much their municipalities grow.

“The [growth plan] employment numbers appear to be aggressive or overly optimistic given the fact that we’re not creating jobs the way we used to,” said Peel Region integrated planning director Arvin Prasad. “We believe there has been a structural change in the economy, a change that we’re trying to figure out.”

Prasad is a member of the Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario, which is asking the province to revise the population and employment targets and provide municipalities some flexibility on how much growth it should accommodate.

Prasad said that based on the 2011 census, Peel Region did not meet its employment targets, and the gap between the jobs Peel creates and its 2041 target will only widen.

“The economy is something that is very difficult to forecast. There’s so many issues ... for example, we’ve lost a lot of manufacturing jobs in Peel Region and we’re moving towards more automation, robotics and warehousing...you don’t need the same labour force that you used to.”

The regional planning commissioners’ recommendations come from a report by Nicola Crawhall and Associates prepared on behalf of the RPCO, Regional Public Works Commissioners of Ontario and the Ontario Regional and Single Tier Treasurers. It outlines 14 recommendations to the province on how best to implement the growth plan as it conducts its coordinated review and one to the federal government.

RPCO chair and Waterloo Region planning, development and legislative services commissioner Rob Horne told NRU that while the growth plan population targets are both “optimistic” and “healthy,” there is concern that municipalities can’t pace their growth and hit their target.

“If growth is occurring too quickly, we’re obstinately putting infrastructure in too early and creating significant debt costs as debenture is a pretty standard way of financing. The other question is if growth levels aren’t achieved, then it’s an inappropriate placement of new infrastructure. It’s really the two pieces: are you building where you should be and are you building in a timely way?”

Horne said that municipalities should be given a range instead of a fixed number as its population target. As an example, he noted that the Ministry of Finance’s 2014 population forecasts, in some cases, differ wildly from those in the growth plan. For example, finance’s 2041 numbers expect 11 per cent more population growth in Peel Region and 37 per cent less population growth in Durham Region than the growth plan.

“We’re not saying that either [the growth plan targets or Ministry of Finance’s projections] are better... There may be a high and a low scenario. Allow municipalities to plan within that.”

Hemson Consulting partner Russell Mathew defends the growth plan targets. Hemson was retained by the province to do the technical background reports for both the 2031 and 2041 population and employment targets. He’s confident the employment targets are still reasonable numbers for GTA municipalities to achieve over the long-term.

“The distribution [among municipalities] may be a little bit different. One of the things that we’re seeing is the resurgence of the downtown office market. There’s been an enormous growth in offices downtown, and that’s been a real shift in the employment patterns that was not apparent in 2011 when we were doing this work.”

What the regional planning commissioners’ report speaks to, Mathew said, are the giant swings in the economy that have short-term implications on growth, but over a long enough period of time they will balance out.

“Municipalities still need, in their normal planning of putting the infrastructure in place, to understand is that there will be cycles in the market. They still need flexibility in the timing of the placement of infrastructure. That has to adjust to the timing of revenue as well. The growth in employment through to 2016 is probably a little slower- particularly with the current technical recession we seem to be having-than it would have been in the forecast. But that has to do with the market cycles, not [with whether] the 2041 number is reasonable is not.”

Neptis Foundation executive director Marcy Burchfield said that while it’s worth discussing how the growth plan targets were created and whether they’re accurate, there is a danger in allowing municipalities flexibility to modify their forecasts locally.

“What the growth plan is trying to do is provide a regional perspective, with a regional allocation of growth. If you allow too much flexibility, there’s danger that we’d return to this ad hoc local planning that happened prior to the growth plan that produced, or resulted in, over designation of land, which is what the growth plan was trying to address.”

“Is the issue the need for more localized control of planning, or the need for more and better forecasting? There needs to be a little bit more discussion around that, and a bit more research on how [other jurisdictions] use these forecasts elsewhere.”