Vaughan city council urged to support Thornhill Muslim community development, pending OMB decision

City of Vaughan planning staff are recommending the government take a favourable position at the Ontario Municipal Board hearings regarding a 28-acre residential development around a Thornhill mosque.

Thestar.com
April 10, 2018
Fatima Dyed

City of Vaughan staff are recommending the municipal government take a favourable position at the Ontario Municipal Board hearings regarding a 28-acre residential development application around a Thornhill mosque.

The recommended approval is conditional, and 46 pages long.

In their report, city planning staff say they recommend city council endorse the application as long as issues identified in studies of the impact of parking, traffic and environmental pressures are addressed — issues Thornhill residents have been at odds about for more than four years.

“It’s too high, too dense, and there too many parking issues,” said Rom Koubi, chairman of the Preserve Thornhill Woods Association.

In 2014, the Islamic Shia Ithna Asheri Jamaat (ISIJ) submitted an application seeking permission to rezone and develop the property around the Jaffari Community Centre mosque at 9000 Bathurst St. The application has since been appealed at the Ontario Municipal Board, with a proposal that had been revised over 28 meetings with city staff and the Preserve Thornhill Woods Association.

The original application consisted of two 17-storey residential apartment buildings and 61 townhouses. It now proposes 6- and 8-storey residential apartment buildings and 60 townhouses.

Despite these changes, many Thornhill residents remain strongly opposed to the development.

In the lead up to and during the almost four-hour long April 4 public hearing, the application received 45 deputations, 125 communications and a petition dated Jan. 21, 2014, containing more than 5,000 names of residents opposing the application. In total, the City of Vaughan has received 360 letters seeking city council’s refusal of the application.

At the hearing, residents’ main concerns were traffic, an issue many told the committee they were “fed up with.” One resident speaking at the hearing called the issue “chronic and ongoing” since the mosque was built. Parking was also a repeated concern, as was the environmental impact of the 28-acre development.

“It has to fit in the neighbourhood,” said Josh Martow, president, Beverly Glen Ratepayers’ Association. Martow has lived in Thornhill all his life, and believes the proposal does not agree with the neighbourhood’s detached-townhomes appearance.

“This land was zoned for something when people bought their homes in the area,” Martow said. “After they’ve made Thornhill their homes, a developer is asking the plans to be turned completely on their head.”

“I don’t think its NIMBY-ism to say when city planners come out and put forward a plan for the neighbourhood, we stick to it.”

Shafiq Ebrahim, ISIJ vice-president, is encouraged by city council’s decision to take a position. “We’ve been working city staff on this for a long time,” he said. “This is due process, we’ll work through it … we’ll do whatever is necessary to build within the parameter we have been approved.”

Mitchell Kosny, the associate director of Ryerson’s school of urban and regional planning, told the Star the fact that the process has taken over four years is “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” He can’t recall a development application that has taken a similar amount of time for a decision to be reached.

“Planning issues are not that complicated,” he said, noting that they are slow and rooted in a complaint-reaction process. “It doesn’t take four years.”

“I think we’re all dancing around what the issue is here,” he added. “Parking, traffic, there’s a hundred of those things, they’re all nice, gentile code for we just don’t want it here or we don’t like them.”

Kosny believes the onus is on city council to make firm decisions on planning issues and help figure out how to help turn suburbs into communities.

“For God’s sake, stand up and make a decision.”

City council will vote on their position Wednesday.