Change will come slowly despite OMB reforms

Thestar.com
Dec. 18, 2017
By Jennifer Pagliaro

After more than 100 years, the Ontario Municipal Board will come to an end.

But things won't change for years.

Queen's Park voted last week to reform the province's most powerful tribunal - responsible for land use planning disputes and how cities are built - and replace it with a new Local Planning Appeal Tribunal aimed at giving power for planning back to cities.

But regulations put forward by the province on how to transition to the new body mean potentially hundreds of applications currently being considered by Toronto staff will still be eligible for appeal under the old system, which has been favourable to developers.

And while city officials have championed the reforms, calling them long overdue, they say the transition plan will cause turmoil at city hall.

"We'll have the OMB with us for years or so, wreaking all kind of havoc," said North York Councillor John Filion, whose Willowdale community is one of several pockets under intense development pressure. "If the government decided that the OMB was bad enough that it needed to be reformed, you have to wonder why they're leaving it in place for so long. You'd think they'd want to minimize the damage."

"It really looks like they've stood there, held the door open for the developers."

The province, through a spokesperson for Minister for Municipal Affairs Bill Mauro, said the regulations are still out for consultation until early in the new year and that they will "consider all feedback."

The province first outlined possible reforms to the tribunal in the fall of 2016 and announced their proposed changes in May, a move celebrated by city officials, urban planners, environmentalists and community groups.

The major detractors have been the development industry who warned that Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) attitudes would be allowed to rule supreme.

The new rules require city councils to make decisions that conform with provincial policies and the city's own rules. Appeals will only be heard on those grounds, making it a true appeals body for the first time in its century-long history.

Under the old system, if a developer didn't like a decision they could seek a new one at the OMB, which was guided under former rules to "have regard" for local decision-making but had the power to overturn council decisions after re-litigating the application.

A regulation put forward by the province as part of the reforms means all complete development applications submitted to the city before it received royal assent on Dec. 12 could be eligible for appeal to the old OMB system.

There are currently 1,177 major applications in the pipeline, according to the city planning division. They did not specify how many of those applications are currently considered complete.

While she remains optimistic developers will want to work with the city, Kerri Voumvakis, who is in charge of city planning policy, noted they continue to see an increasing number of appeals. The number more than doubled in 2017 over the same period last year.

"There's going to be a huge workload increase for the OMB," Voumvakis said.

At a development meeting in his busy Yonge-Eglinton area ward Wednesday night, Councillor Josh Matlow said he found out on his way in the front door that another application was being appealed.

"This is an example where the developer's application, while still half-baked, wasn't far out of the range for what I think city planning would eventually support," he said. "We were having productive discussions."

An appeal at that stage "takes the wind out of the sails of trying to find resolution between all parties when they go to the board and now everybody feels like there's a gun to their heads . . . It's happening over and over again."

The reason for reform, and the fear with the ongoing reign of the OMB, city officials say, is communities continue to buckle under growth without relief from problematic precedents set by the old tribunal. While waiting for change, they say, schools remain at capacity, there is an increasing lack of parks and recreation spaces, and packed subway cars continue to pass platforms teeming with commuters.